Picture of author.
11+ Works 14,067 Members 318 Reviews 14 Favorited

About the Author

AZAR NAFISI is a visiting professor and the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University. She has taught Western literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and the University of Allameh Tabatabai in Iran. In 1994 she won a show more teaching fellowship from Oxford University, and in 1997 she and her family left Iran for America. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic and has appeared on radio and television programs. Azar's book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, was published in 2003 to wide acclaim. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Author Azar Nafisi at the 2015 Texas Book Festival. By Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44476478

Works by Azar Nafisi

Associated Works

Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (1010) — Foreword, some editions — 760 copies
Last Folio: Textures of Jewish Life in Slovakia (2011) — Contributor — 15 copies
Inge Morath: Iran (2009) — Contributor — 13 copies

Tagged

21st century (40) American literature (33) autobiography (232) autobiography/memoir (37) Azar Nafisi (37) biography (355) Biography & Autobiography (35) biography-memoir (60) book club (95) book group (33) books (193) books about books (217) books and reading (58) censorship (90) culture (65) education (84) English literature (33) feminism (159) fiction (166) history (103) Iran (1,140) Iranian (53) Islam (295) literary criticism (132) literature (373) memoir (1,496) Middle East (371) non-fiction (1,257) novel (45) own (70) owned (37) politics (84) read (145) reading (148) religion (90) Tehran (106) to-read (577) unread (128) women (372) women's studies (131)

Common Knowledge

Members

Reviews

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.

… (more)
 
Flagged
lelandleslie | 278 other reviews | Feb 24, 2024 |
Difficult subject to read about. Reading it in 2024 makes it feel a bit dated since it is gotten so much worse for women.
 
Flagged
kakadoo202 | 278 other reviews | Feb 18, 2024 |
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.
 
Flagged
eurydactyl | 278 other reviews | Jul 20, 2023 |

Lists

Awards

You May Also Like

Associated Authors

Statistics

Works
11
Also by
5
Members
14,067
Popularity
#1,635
Rating
½ 3.6
Reviews
318
ISBNs
116
Languages
15
Favorited
14

Charts & Graphs