Totalitarian regimes tend to believe everything about reading is bad. An uninformed, incurious population is much easier to control. Theocracies, too, tend to be interested in suppression of alternate ideas. So a totalitarian theocracy, like the modern-day Republic of Iran, is doubly suspicious of books. So when native Iranian but American-educated former university professor Azar Nafisi starts teaching Western literary classics to a small group of past students in her home, she's doing more than assembling a book club with promising young minds. She can't even get enough black market copies of Lolita for everyone to have one...some of the girls use photocopies to read from.

Nafisi uses four major works of the literary canon as lenses through which to tell her story: the titular Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice. She touches relatively briefly on her childhood in Iran, her emigration to the United States to study, and her brief, unhappy first marriage followed by her second, much better one. The book spends much more time discussing life when she returns to Iran with her husband and begins teaching as the Islamic Revolution unfolds, and the restrictions on female and literary life under the ayatollahs.

Nafisi has a unique perspective on the Islamic Revolution as both insider (she was born and spent a large portion of her childhood in Iran, and married a fellow Persian and moved back) and outsider (she spent her early adulthood in the United States and got a Western education before she came back). It's fascinating and horrifying to read about how women's roles and rights were pushed back and back as time went on...Nafisi is never run out of the workplace per se, but she is threatened with an anonymous note and was subject to constant harassment over not wearing her headscarf properly, and eventually decides that continuing to teach is more trouble than it's worth. As she watches her students struggle to make their own lives and raises her daughter, it becomes obvious to her that she can't stay in Iran even though she doesn't want to leave, either.

It's useful to come in with a working comprehension of the novels Nafisi focuses on, since she discusses them and how their themes relate to situations she deals with at length. I'd read three of the four coming in (no Daisy Miller for me), and while it's certainly possible to understand the book without the literary references, it's definitely richer and deeper if you can follow along. For the most part I enjoyed the way she used the focus novels, though I did get a little irritated in the section on Lolita when she claimed repeatedly that she wasn't comparing the ayatollahs to Humbert and Iranian women to Lolita and then went on to do just that over and over. I think it's an interesting and valid way to look at Lolita, but if you're going to go there don't pretend that's not what you're trying to do. On the whole, though, it's a very interesting memoir, especially for a bookish audience! ( )

Azar Afisi's memoir makes a good case for reading the classics of Western literature no matter where you are. Her perspectives on her students' plight, the ongoing struggle of Iranian citizens, and her country's violent transformation into an Islamic state will provide valuable insights to anyone interested in current international events. ( )

A memoir of life in Tehran under the Islamic Republic during the 1980s and 1990s from the point of view of a secular, liberal member of the intelligentsia.

Nafisi is a professor of English literature, and the best parts of the book are the scenes of Iranian students in the early days of the revolution, and later in Nafisi's private study group in the late 1990s, reacting to the novels she loves and teaches. The classroom "trial" of The Great Gatsby, in which an ardent Islamic revolutionary student condems the book as a part of the decadent and immoral West, while another student argues in defense of its moral value, was a high point. Nafisi's drawing of a parallel between Humbert's "pinning" of Lolita and forcing her to be the person of his own imagination and what Nafisi sees as a similar act by Khomeini and the Islamic Republic in forcing Iranians to conform to their fantasies of how people should behave also struck me as interesting.

But there was less of that than I would have thought, and more of Nafisi's own condemnations and rants against the Islamic regime and its supporters and how it all made her feel. And most of the book's scenes with her small private study group of women equally alienated from the regime is spent complaining about their lives and the government, rather than discussing literature. Though to be sure, they have plenty to complain about, no argument there.

The book is interesting and worth reading, but I do wish Nafisi could have toned down her obviously strong impulse to write about "how the Islamic Republic made me continually feel depressed" and concentrated somewhat more on the actual works of English literature and how her students responded to them in their particular, much different, society.

( )

Difficult subject to read about. Reading it in 2024 makes it feel a bit dated since it is gotten so much worse for women. ( )

I was so interested in the subject, I wanted to know about the student's lives in Tehran and the experience of freedom this class gave them. I only got through 10%.

While what I listed above that is definitely a part of the book, the majority of it seems to be about the author, her experience, and how it affected her. In the first 10% I read, there is an almost exhausting amount of 'I's and 'me's. As some other reviews have said, it does come off as self-important. ( )