|
Loading... Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Booksby Azar Nafisi
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendations
Loading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. too many good books in the world to waste any more time on this book! Couldn't finish. (  ) pwagner2 | Oct 13, 2009 |  This book did not live up to its promise. It purported to be a group of women in Iran forming a book group to be able to escape the restrictions of the regime, if only through fiction. It started off as this, but then veered off and became a wildly self-pitying, self-indulgent claptrap. As the "magician" quite rightly pointed out - the author blamed the Republic of Iran for everything, and it got rather tedious I'm afraid. If it had focussed on the books a bit more, and looked at different ways of viewing them, as it did in the first section with Lolita, this would have been a wonderful book. It just wasn't. (  ) heidijane | Sep 22, 2009 | i loved this combination of autobiography, literature teaching, students' lives. lisette lecat is a great reader. (  ) mahallett | Sep 21, 2009 | Azar Nafisi gives us a such a gift with her book, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Set during a tumultuous time in Iran's history, she was a college professor, trying to teach Western literature, a very dangerous thing to attempt. Met with constant criticism and threats, she continued to fight the laws of her land by teaching from authors and books frowned on as wicked books from the west. Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice and many other authors and their works contained ideas and themes Ms. Nafisi was passionate about. She even went so far as to organize a secret "book club" that met in her home to more openly discuss the subjects related to literature that were harder to do in the very controlled college setting. We see, through her eyes, what was happening in Iran and how it affected what she chose to teach and how that in turn, shaped her, her students, friends and family. This group started out a bit tentative at first, but grew into a wonderful and colorful gathering of people that came together to discuss not only the authors and their books, but also their personal lives and the world they found themselves living in. So, through these people Ms. Nafisi introduces us too-personally and professionally-- we see many different viewpoints on what it was like living in revolutionary Iran. I think people who are more familiar with the books and authors discussed in this book will be able to appreciate the topics better, as I had only read a couple of the mentioned books. A very interesting read even though it took me a while to get through it. (  ) DanaJean | Aug 24, 2009 | Her courage and passion for literature as a reference for transformation are infectious. She makes me want to re-read Lolita, Wings of the Dove, Pride & Prejudice, etc. (  ) weeziemae | Aug 12, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 081297106X, Paperback)An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people's lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color." Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of "morality guards," the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became "essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity," she writes.Threaded into the memoir are trenchant discussions of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors who provided the women with examples of those who successfully asserted their autonomy despite great odds. The great works encouraged them to strike out against authoritarianism and repression in their own ways, both large and small: "There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom," she writes. In short, the art helped them to survive. --Shawn Carkonen (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
Abebooks |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
