Things I've Been Silent About: Memories (2008)

A slow read about growing up in Iran. Perhaps if I knew more about the politics of the time, it would be a bit easier. However, I do love getting the perspective of the people who seem to be on the outside of their culture and how this has affected them. ( )

I read Nafisi's best known book, [b:Reading Lolita in Tehran|7603|Reading Lolita in Tehran|Azar Nafisi|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347469176s/7603.jpg|903067], when it was first published in 2003. While I appreciated the work, it did not leave me with a desire to read anything else by Nafisi. I admired the writing, but I had conceived a dislike for the writer. I cannot easily explain why. However, it seemed to me that there was something unapproachable about Nafisi - an intellectual arrogance, maybe - which made me unable to warm to her.

A few weeks ago I became involved in a discussion about Iran in a GR group which encouraged me to put aside my negative reaction to Nafisi and read this book. Reading it hasn't made me like Nafisi much better. However, it has given an opportunity to analyse why I had that reaction. It has also given me an opportunity to develop some empathy for Nafisi.

There are a number of things that I really like about this book. First, there's its style. Nafisi's prose is beautiful: elegant, lucid, intelligent. She weaves Persian and western literary allusions into her narrative in a way which illuminates and adds to the text. Next, there's the evocation of a past Iran, with every day events and family history woven into the fabric of social and political history. In addition, there‘s Nafisi’s ability to re-create in her writing a child's perspective and reactions to the events going on around her. There's also - I think - a genuine attempt to be honest and to write an account of her life which goes against the cultural imperative to keep family secrets within the family.

What I like less about the book is Nafisi herself: her elusiveness, her brittleness, her remoteness. To me she comes across as rigid, uncompromising and possibly as someone who would deal with opposition – or more particularly with disappointment or the thwarting of her will – in a manner just as unsatisfactory as her mother’s. In addition, Nafisi makes a point of saying that this work is about truth-telling. Although I believe that she has written with honesty, there are still some things which I don't think are well-explained. One of them is Nafisi's decision to marry the first time. Escaping home makes sense, but given that Nafisi's family supported her desire for further education, it's not clear why she didn't choose to study abroad without getting married first.

I read lots of books about Iran. It's a country and a culture that I love and with which I am familiar. Eight years after reading [b:Reading Lolita in Tehran|7603|Reading Lolita in Tehran|Azar Nafisi|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347469176s/7603.jpg|903067], I'm glad to have finally acquired a little more understanding of Nafisi and the family dynamics which have influenced her. I also understand what caused my initial negative reaction to her writing. With that understanding, I won't be reluctant to read what she writes in the future.

A post-script: I've noticed something odd. Nafisi's GR biography page states that she was born in 1955. However, given that she was in high school at the time her father was imprisoned in 1963 and was married for the first time when she was in her late teens and her father was still in prison three years later, a 1955 birthdate seems somewhat unlikely.

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Well I am giving this three stars for now, and I will think about whether I want to give it more. On GR three stars mean I liked it. Which I did. Oddly, I liked it slightly less than Reading Lolita even though one of my major complaints about the previous book was that it was curiously reticient and impersonal, and this one is anything but reticent and impersonal.

Nafisi, having decided to confront the problematic legacy of her parents, confronts it head on, even if that means being critical of people who she very clearly loved greatly despite their considerable flaws. I respect the unflinching honesty with which she does this. There are some very vivid episodes here. But in the end I'm not sure what it adds up to.

There is a thread in this memoir about a family tendency to see life through the lens of fiction - using poetry and storytelling and literature sometimes to make sense of their experiences and sometimes to hide from or even deny them. This interested me a lot. But as much as it interested me, it wasn't fully teased out into a consistent theme or brought to any kind of conclusion so I just ended up feeling sort of unsatisfied.

Also - as in the first book- I come away feeling that there is a great deal here that I just don't understand. In a number of places she will relate an incident or an occurance and then draw an implication or a conclusion from it that for me didn't follow at all. I feel like I'm not always able to follow the through line even though it clearly seems so self evident to her that she doesn't feel a need to connect the dots.

I don't know if this is a cultural or a personal disconnect, that I have trouble following because we are from such different backgrounds or because we have different natures and personalities. All of which is not to say that this was a badly written or uninteresting book because it most definitely was not. I think perhaps I am frustrated with it precisely because she can clearly write well and vividly and yet somehow she still remains for me always just slightly out of reach and out of focus.

Interestingly in this book Nafisi describes her mother as someone you can never quite grasp, someone who slips through your fingers like smoke, leaving you slightly bereft and at a little bit of loss. It seems to me she inherited some of those traits herself. Yet, again like the mother she describes, she is still a source of great interest as well as frustration.
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Positively Brilliant memoir coupled with listening to the author tell it really made the book for me. Almost as wonderful as hearing Azar Nafisi speak in person. ( )

Really intended for an Iranian audience, so might have made more sense to publish it in Farsi.

If you were intrigued by some aspects of, say, the Iranian revolution or Iranian overseas student movements that were lightly brushed upon in Nafisi's previous book, you're not going to find much elaboration here.

Odd for a woman who has spent her life studying literature. Nafisi didn't grasp which aspects of her life and experiences would most interest foreign readers.

Instead, the focus is on Nafisi's parents. There isn't enough context to understand how Nafisi's family fits into the Iran's recent history or the economic and political structures past or present. Was Iran in the early 1960s more like a 3rd World or Second World country? There seems to be an large upper bourgeoisie (I'm guessing), to which her family belonged. Nafisi's family seems to have been quite wealthy and yet she still doesn't realize it. Here she is being sent off as an adolescent to an English boarding school and later off to college in the US. After marriage, Nafisi's mother goes off on her own for six months to learn English in England (servants make very shadowy appearances) yet education for women seems to have been limited to the equivalent of high school.

So there's a parliament and Nafisi's mother somehow gets elected to it, though she had no professional credentials or accomplishment. So what was the basis? A class thing? Charitable works? Family history? What powers does the parliament have anyway when the Shah seems to be calling all the shots? Wait, there are political parties?! Was there any possibility of peaceful devolution to totally elected rulers? How did her father become mayor or Tehran and what was the extent of his authority? ( )