When I signed up the bookring for Reading Lolita in Tehran, I'd anticipated reading a book about a woman fighting for human rights in an increasingly intolerant society. Reading Lolita is this book, but it is much more. Nafisi creates a safe place for women to gather and explore what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, by reading and discussing literature. Nafisi's group faces bullets and beheadings, yet the most awful horror is the day-to-day slow death of the world of the imagination. It is difficult to get the news from poemsyet men die miserably every dayfor lackof what is found there. - William Carlos Williams ( )

I'm currently halfway through this book as I'm reading it for book club. I am enjoying the idea of this book, but the deconstruction of the classic literature isn't my cup of tea. I understand what Azar is trying to do in her book by comparing famous (and unread by me) works of literature to the lives in Iran, but those comparisons are too drawn out for my tastes.
It is an interesting read regardless, but if it weren't for the fact I have to read it for book club, I wouldn't finish the book. ( )

A book-lover's delight. As the book itself claims, a must-read for anyone who has been part of a book-club. It is a tad haphazard, even meandering at times, but, to Nafisi's credit, you never feel bored throughout this 300-odd page bestseller. Worth a try. ( )

Terrific and inspiring story of one woman's love for, and struggles with, her home country of Iran. Throw in some insightful literary criticism, unique teaching methods, and an eyewitness account of the revolution and you end up with a five star companion to Persepolis. ( )

So..I felt pretty intellectual reading this book. It's about a lady professor in Iran and her experiences during the revolution. She is a thinker and is constantly battered down by the Islamic regime. She finds a escape in fiction -- reading and teaching it. The book is divided into sections: Lolita, Gatsby, James, & Austen. I really enjoyed re-learning about these different works of literature and the lengths the people in Iran had to go to just to read and discuss them. I must admit that most of the time her thoughts were a little over my head, but maybe that was just because I was listening to it and sometimes my mind wandered.. So poignant to learn about the way people had to slowly give up their freedom. I definitely would not want to be a woman in Iran. ( )

Listening to this on a Playaway. Narrated by Lisette Lecat, of [book: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency] audiobooks.*** UPDATE ***This was perhaps not a good choice for a Playaway. I feel somewhat disoriented because of the narrative structure; the author drifts among descriptions of modern life in Tehran, synopses of her book discussions with her students, and lecture-style literary criticism of Nabokov and others. Also difficult to tell when a chapter begins with a lengthy quotation (such an easy thing to see on the page, with typesetting clues to guide you!). I am also unable to fully distinguish Nafisi's students from one another, which makes for frustrating listening. That's not Nafisi's fault, but a limitation of my own brain: my verbal skills are much more visual than auditory... I can't remember a word or name unless I can visualize its spelling!I did enjoy this, but I'm going to start over with the print version.

More than just a diary of a book club, [book: Reading Lolita in Tehran] offers a deeply personal view of the Iranian Revolution and life in the Islamic Republic. Late in the book, the author admits, "I am too much of an academic: I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narratives without pontificating."This is a forgivable offense, as Nafisi pontificates more eloquently than any literature professor I've ever heard. I can't recommend this highly enough. ( )

too many good books in the world to waste any more time on this book! Couldn't finish. ( )

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. ( )

i loved this combination of autobiography, literature teaching, students' lives.
lisette lecat is a great reader. ( )

Azar Nafisi gives us 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 to-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. ( )

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. ( )

This is going *really* slowly. It keeps sounding like a interesting book to read, but I keep picking up other books and never finishing this one. I'll keep working on it...

I read this book for my Thursday night book group. It was one of our favorites the year it was published. We even made an exception and read it before it came out in paperback. The liberating effect of literature on the students of Ms. Nafisi was inspirational. ( )

Reading Lolita in Tehran recounts Azar Nafisi's time in Iran, teaching literature under a regime that frowned upon Western influence and creative expression generally. Through the books that she reads with her students - Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Henry James, and Jane Austen - she also explores the social dynamics of Iran, post-Revolution and in the thick of oppressive fundamentalism.

It was a really interesting look at Iranian culture. But readers should already have some familiarity with the Revolution and Islamic fundamentalism; Nafisi doesn't explain or expound exactly in the places that she needs to. The memoir skips between her classes and book club, the struggles she has with the University of Tehran, Iranian society, and her personal life. If she had focused the book a little bit better, choosing to develop just one or two of these strands - I would personally like more about literature and censorship in Iran, those were my favorite parts - it would have been a more compelling narrative. Still, an interesting and unique way to offer a view of present-day Iran and Islam. ( )

http://thebookwormslibrary.com/?p=489... ( )

Definitely worth reading. It wasn't a quick read - it took me longer than most books of this length would - but I enjoyed it. It's a memoir by an Iranian professor of Western literature. Through her experiences as a woman in revolutionary Iran, her relationships with her students and mentor, and the connections between fiction and reality, she tries to make sense of her memories. I probably would have enjoyed the book more if I had read all of the books the author discusses (particularly Henry James, who I don't love), but I was familiar enough with the authors and the main books (Lolita, The Great Gatsby, several by Jane Austen) that it wasn't problematic. I'd recommend this one to anyone with an interest in both literature and recent history in the Middle East. ( )

This book is an account of living under Ayatollah Khomeini's regime under sharia law, told partly through discussions of literature.

To read this book was, for me, slightly disorientating: for I felt like I was reading dystopian fiction, having a window into these women's lives under the regime. Yet it is autobiographical.

I guess what hits hardest about the novel was that prior to Khomeini's accession, women were on a similarly liberated footing in Iran as in the West:

"At the start of the 20th Century, the age of marriage in Iran - 9, according to sharia laws - was changed to 13 and then later to 18. My mother had chosen whom she wanted to marry and she had been one of the first six women elected to Parliament in 1963. When I was growing up, in the 1960s, there was little difference between my rights and the rights of women in Western democracies. But it was not the fashion then to think that our culture was not compatible with modern democracy, that there were Western and Islamic versions of democracy and human rights. We all wanted opportunities and freedom. That is why we supported revolutionary change - we were demanding more rights, not fewer.

I married on the eve of revolution, a man I loved. [...] By the time my daughter was born five years later, the laws had regressed to what they had been before my grandmother's time: the first law to be repealed, months before the ratification of a new constitution, was the family-protection law, which guaranteed women's rights at home and at work. [...] My youthful years had witnessed the rise of two women to the rank of cabinet minister. After the revolution, these same two women were sentenced to death for the sins of warring with God and spreading prostitution. One of them [...] had been abroad at the time of the revolution and remained in exile. [...] The other, the minister of education and my former high school principal, was put in a sack and stoned or shot to death." (Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi, p.261-262)

With its atmosphere of surveillance, propaganda and morality squads, it felt like I was reading something along the lines of Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, because it seems so alien. As you can probably tell, I didn't know much about Iran, (and indeed, still know passing little), but have been inspired to find out more.

I liked the way that books are reference points, memoirs, to the book. Nafisi taught literature and her enthusiasm for the texts translates well, (to the point I have a new list of books I wish to read or re-read) while also throwing the repressiveness of the regime into sharp relief. ( )

Azar Nafisi, now living in the United States, is a professor, a journalist, and an author who writes of her experiences in teaching English Literature in Tehran, Iran. The book is broken down into four segments of different time periods ranging from 1979 to 1997. With each period of time Azar correlates the occurrences of her life in Iran with the works of different authors.

The book begins in 1995, when Azar is no longer employed by the University of Tehran, but is teaching a private class at her home. She gathers seven highly intelligent women for a weekly meeting that resembles a book club. The first book they must read is Lolita. Azar is quoted as saying her objective was “choosing a work of fiction that would most resonate with our lives in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Iran every woman is a Lolita; marriage is allowed at the age of 9”. So Azar makes Xerox copies of her censored book and the class begins. As the seven young women share their thoughts, their experiences, their pain and their joys with Azar and the rest of the class, we learn many facts about every day life in Iran.

Streets of Tehran are patrolled by armed militia in white Toyotas, called “The Blood of God”, or “Morality Squads”. Their sole function is making sure women are veiled, and covered properly when in public. Women may not wear make-up, show any hair, or let their finger nails grow “too long”. These “crimes” result in arrests, floggings, and jail sentences. But it is not just women who suffer. Iran is intent on purging the country of “decadent western culture”. The entire country is deprived; no alcohol, no satellite dishes, no modern music, no touching someone of the opposite sex, in fact men are strongly discouraged from even looking at a woman’s face when out if public.

The second segment of the book drops back in time to 1979. Azar was teaching at the University of Tehran and the class is reading The Great Gatsby. Azar dissects every little nuance of Gatsby and then proceeds to compare it’s substance with what the people in Iran are experiencing, in an intellectual, abstract sort of way. In the meantime, Iran is in the midst of a revolutionary takeover. There are demonstrations, sit-ins, violence, arrests, and executions. This should have been one of the most interesting segments of the book, but I had a hard time staying interested. I just didn’t get the connection between Gatsby and Iran. And I felt Azar literally had her nose buried in a book, and everything that happened merely resulted in her giving a more intensified literary evaluation/comparison to The Great Gatsby.

The third and fourth segments revolve around the continued chaos that the revolution brings, and the Iran/Iraq war. Many facts about every day life in Tehran, and the lives of the women in the “book club”, paralleled with the literary works of Henry James and Jane Austin. Discussions about social decorum, personal power struggles, relationships, love, happiness, integrity, and freedom. It was fascinating to read about life in Iran, unfortunately the history and culture of Iran were overshadowed by Azar’s ongoing literary lecture. I would only recommend this book to someone who is an avid reader of the authors mentioned in the book. ( )

Fascinating ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1213868...

This is a brilliant book about literature in a society which is closing itself up. There are four sections (the first two names after books, Lolita and Gatsby; the others after authors, James and Austen) but the key is the first section, where Nafisi, fired from her university teaching post for not conforming to the strict dress code, sets up a reading group for seven women to read, among other works, Lolita. There is of course a gross parallel, in that the damage Humbert inflicts on Lolita is analogous (in some cases, identical) to that inflicted by the Iranian authorities on their own people, especially women. But the wider point Nafisi makes is to describe the response of her students to great literature and to make the case that it is an essential part of the human condition - and to deny it is inhuman.

The Gatsby section goes back to the early days of the revolution, and chronicles the heady times of ideals and the gradual encroachment of the values of the Islamic Republic, culminating in a rather funny court scene where The Great Gatsby itself is put on trial. Nafisi is pretty merciless in mocking the intellectual contributions of the most doctrinaire of the students, and I suspect that they are an easy target.

The second half of the book chronicles her gradual disengagement from Iran and eventual emigration. It's still very good but the first half is the essential part of the argument, the bit that Marjane Satrapi doesn't have as much of.

Wikipedia has an account of the criticism levelled at the book and the author from various quarters. A lot of it simply isn't fair: Nafisi is a specialist in English-language literature, so it's hardly surprising that she chose that as the subject of her classes. It is true that of course this may play to the prejudices of the monoglot Anglophone philistine, but this is clearly not Nafisi's purpose. Another rather peculiar criticism is that the book describes Iran at its darkest, between 1979 and 1996, and things are better now. This is unfair because Nafisi is diligent at specifying dates, to moor the narrative to a particular set of points in the past rather than the present, and at portraying a society as it changes for the worse, but at the same time showing hope that it may change for the better. (And anyway, while things may have improved slightly under the later presidencies of Khatami and Ahmedinejad, I don't get the impression that the improvement is much to write books about.)

Part of this, of course, is a reflection in Wikipedia of the peculiar toxicity attached to Iran in American public discourse. I was utterly astonished the other day to catch a CNN commentator describe President Ahmadinejad as the most evil person in the world (I do not paraphrase). There are a lot of other candidates; most of them are of course on better terms with the US government. The concentration on Ahmadinejad as hate figure (consider also the extraordinarily inhospitable remarks made by the President of Columbia University when introducing him back in September 2007) also displays an unwillingness to get to grips with the roles of the Supreme Leader and Council of Guardians. It is a shame if Nafisi's book helps perpetuate those prejudices, though I can't believe that a thoughtful reader would take that message from it. ( )

Parts of this book I liked, other parts not as much. When the author discussed the books that were read in her reading group, it would take on a doctoral dissertation tone. Perhaps those who are really into analyzing literature would appreciate these sections more than I did. I kind of got bogged down during these parts.

The author does discuss the individual lives of the young women in the book discussion group, and this was interesting because it gave me a feel for what the women had to go through once the shah was overthrown and the Islamic Republic was established. Men in general are not treated very sympathetically in this book.

Many parts of this book are very well written. Still not an easy or light read, though. ( )

Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) is a memoir about life and Iran and reading English language books by Azar Nafisi. My alumni chapter book club selected this book appropriately about a book club Nafisi started to read Western literature with young women she had taught at the university in Tehran. The book is divided into four sections loosely draping Nafisi's story over the works of four authors: Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the works of Henry James (particularly Daisy Miller), and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The first section focuses mainly on the reading group and the conversations therein, while the reamaining three sections are more of a straight-forward memoir. Nafisi is educated in America (in Oklahoma, no less, which she makes sound like a hotbed of Iranian revolutionaries), returns to teach in Tehran right at the time of the revolution, loses her positions due to her liberal ways, returns to teaching (albeit compromising some of her principles), and then starts the reading group. Finally, Nafisi departs Iran for good for the United States where she teaches and writes to this day.

This is horribly judgmental of me, especially to say of someone who lived under a totalitarian regime, but I found that Nafisi comes across as whiny, at least in the first chapter. Marjane Satrapi (who is roughly the age of one of Nafisi's "girls") writes much more eloquently about the Iranian Revolution and the oppression of the Islamic regime, especially for women. The discussion of the books and life issues by the women of the reading group is supposed to be central to this work, but I never get the sense of individuality of the women in the group as if they're only there to fill a role for Nafisi's thesis. I warmed up to this book in the second section when Nafisi's class puts the novel The Great Gatsby on trial, a clever way of discussing the book and the clash of cultures of the students in reading it. Nafisi is at her best when discussing the books and I found her observations quite illuminating. Especially for Lolita which I read many years ago but didn't really follow it all to well. I think Nafisi must be an excellent teacher and her passion for the novels comes across well in this work. Ultimately this is a pretty good book, especially for its literary sections as well as a glimpse into life in modern Iran.
Favorite Passages

In class, we were discussing the concept of the villain in the novel. I had mentioned that Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiousity about other poeple and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people. He had created the Lolita he desired, and would not budge from that image. I reminded them of Humbert's statement that he wished to stop time and keep Lolita forever on "an islnd of entranced time," a task undertaken only by Gods and poets. - p. 48-49
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. - p. 76
This respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel. It is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabakov and Bellow. This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy. The personalized version of good and evil usurps and individualizes the more archetypal concepts, such as courage or heroism, that shaped the epic or romance. A hero becomes one who safeguards his or her individual integrity at almost any cost. - p. 224 ( )

In Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, we are introduced to a group of 7 women (though they are referred to as girls) who arrive at the author's home every Thursday morning for 2 years. The women are a very diverse group who have a shared interest in literature and learning. These women are described and discussed in this book in such a way that much of the essence they must have in real life, shines through and I couldn't help but connect with them even though I often couldn't empathise. Nafisi states often in the book that when the girls, and others, share their tragic stories, it is always in a way which denies the listener any chance of feeling sympathy and empathy with them and I love that Nafisi was able to bring that across in the book.

This book is formed of four sections: Lolita, Gatsby, James and Austen. In these sections we are not only treated to wonderfully in depth explorations of various books but we get to see the impact of these works on the girls, and also on the author's students during her years of teaching at various universities. Simultaneously in this great book we are exposed to little glimpses of life in Tehran, political and religious issues, the brutality that occurred during and after the war, and so much more. While much of the book paints a dark picture, I couldn't help but be enraptured by the small and rare moments of beauty. The descriptions of 'The Magician" and his delicate ways. The way he stays away from people mostly and yet when he does allow them to visit, he takes great care to make them feel welcome and even serves little chocolates on a plate. The playful innocence as girls fall in love and discuss it with a shyness that touched my heart. The inner beauty that shone from each of their souls, along with a desperate hope. It makes for a splendid contrast and shows us that while it's not often easy to see, there is another side to their lives that without the totalitarian way of life would probably surface more easily.

Much of it was a shock to me as I knew little of Tehran and Iran before this book and I think what hit me more, was that I often forget how amazingly different cultures can be. This was a brilliant reminder. It is impossible for me to try and explain what makes this book so great, it is a mix of so many things but for me especially, it was the way that this book draws the reader in and pulls them close to the many people within the pages, sharing an intimacy between the two that is rarely (if ever) shared between the people in the book.

It's a wonderful book and one that not only will I read again, but which has inspired me to explore the books described within. ( )

I have always been a fan of books that discuss other books, and this is a prime example of this type of a work. What I love about Nafisi's book is that not only does the provide the reader with a wonderful look into classic writing of the Western world--a very different point of view given her Iranian background and experiences as well as those of the women in her group--but she also gives fabulous insight into the political, social, and religious situation in her country as seen through the eyes of a number of women who, despite differing beliefs on many subjects, all embrace their desire to read and analyze these wonderful works of literature.

Having grown up hearing about Iran in the news, and having known several people of Iranian background during my life--including several who fled the country in the wake of the Shah's departure--I appreciated getting a much more internal and personal look at the situation in that country and the way it has shifted and changed over the past couple of decades. ( )