Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

This is not always an easy book to read or to like. Its episodic, it jumps around, at times the narrator inserts herself so thoroughly into the foreground that she's all you can see. The match between the lives of women in the revolutionary republic of Iran and such hoary classics as Pride and Prejudice, Daisy Miller, The Great Gatsby sometimes seems tenuous and odd. At times Nafisi makes pronouncements that don't seem to me to follow from the tale she was telling.

But I think its actually the things that make it difficult that also make it rewarding. This is what it says it is; A Memoir. Its not a polished and orderly explication of the political and social history of modern Iran. Its a very personal evocation of one woman's jumbled, show more confusing, contradictory, and difficult experience of a painful time that she survived in part through studying great literature with other women. At the time of this writing I don't think she had yet entirely made sense of that experience and so it takes some work on the reader's part to try to comprehend the confusion.

In the end I failed to entirely create order out of the chaos but honestly I think it would be less of a book if I had succeeded. How do you make sense of life in a country in which the movie censor is blind, in which proctors monitor a concert to be certain no one including the musicians, shows too much enthusiasm. How can you make sense of a place in which some people are executed for some minor infraction, some simply vanish for reasons unknown, while others escape punishment entirely. But this is your homeland, a place you loved, had great hopes for and eventually find it necessary to leave.

To make a polished orderly story out of this would I think be dishonest to the experience. So somehow the jumble and the confusion and the strange connections all work for me. I don't feel I read a textbook about Iran I feel that I met one Iranian woman. Flawed in places but interesting and challenging and something I walk away from still thinking hard. show less

Reading Lolita in Tehran is one of the most beautifully written books I have read. Full of lines such as Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms.

Another one I liked is: A novel is not an allegory... It is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter the world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is the heart of a novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

She uses this logic with her own writing, drawing you in to revolutionary Iran. Deftly comparing and contrasting nightmarish, totalitarian scenes show more of the Islamic Republic’s ‘morality guards’ that feel like something straight out of 1984 with scenes and analysis from novels as diverse as Lolita and The Great Gatsby.

A very enjoyable and one of a kind book. show less

From its provoking, intriguing title to its very last page, Azar Nafisi's book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, partly a narrative biography, partly a history of a nation and its people, and partly critical analysis of great American and British authors, is astonishing, enlightening, and important. Much like Marjane Satrapi's amazing graphic novels, Nafisi pulls back the headscarves, the long black robes dictated by the Guardian Council, to show us the modern women of Iran and how they fight to maintain their sense of identity.Focusing in a large part around the seven students Nafisi convinced to meet in her apartment after quitting her job at the University of Tehran, the book introduces us to each of the young women and gives a thumbnail show more account of her life and its hardships and its joys. There is an early image in the book when the narrator talks to a painter student of hers about color. Paradise, the painter tells her, the color of her paradise is swimming pool blue. A year after the revolution, her father died, the government confiscated their house which included a big swimming pool where she had trained regularly. My paradise is down at the bottom of that swimming pool, she tells her teacher.And that in a nutshell is why such a book like Lolita is so meaningful, so powerful in a place like Iran. In a country where young girls can be arrested for eating an apple to lasciviously or for licking ice cream in public, where the very first action upon seizure of power during the Iranian Revolution (before even writing a new constitution) was to lower the age of consent for marriage from eighteen down to nine, a book about a middle aged man who destroys the life of a pubescent girl is all too familiar.There is much here for fans of Nabokov in general, not just Lolita, but especially (and blackly humorously) An Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov's most Kafkan story. The mindless, impenetrable mysteries of authoritarianism were wonderfully grasped in Kafka and regardless of ideology powering the system they are almost always universally the same. For Nabokov, who lived under such a system in the Soviet Union, or for Nafisi in Iran, the repression in all its brutal absurdity is the same.Consider that in Iran, under the mullahs, the position of film censor was held by a nearly blind man. It is a curious feature of totalitarian government, as noted by Kundera, that irony is completely and entirely dead among the political class, that the sheer humor to be derived from a blind censor is never apparent. It's black humor is unknown. "Our world under the mullahs' rule," Nafisi writes, "was shaped by the colorless lenses of the blind censor. Not just our reality, but also our fiction had taken on this curious coloration in a world where the censor was the poet's rival in rearranging and shaping reality."What becomes crystal clear as you listen to Nafisi's narration, is what a radical act reading is, how it is peering into a created world and determining your relation to it, it is an act of discovery that sneaks in self-discovery. To discuss books, to talk with a class about them is to articulate your own thinking, it is to think aloud about nothing less than self-discovery. It is all the more important an act of personal revolution when one lives under a totalitarian regime that would dictate to you your personality and appropriate and inappropriate thoughts and beliefs about the world around you. To then discuss with another person your own intimate creation of a world shared with the author is to create an intimacy with others, it is a connection you make of your innermost self with others' innermost selves, it is a connection of your projected conception of yourself with others' projected conception of theirselves.It is, in short, nearly the most important thing in human life.And for repressive forces, it is perhaps the most dangerous rebellion of all. Or as Nabokov puts it, "Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form."The book's second part is primarily made up of a thumbnail history of the Iranian Revolution in which the author found herself whirled. What's surprising is that even in its shrunken form, the history adds to the complexity of the picture in a way American accounts never seem capable of doing. That the early stages of the Revolution was not primarily religious, but that they came to dominate after factionalism crippled the more secular-minded of the youthful revolutionaries and the communist leaders, was something one rarely hears in accounts here in America.It is a step back into the past even more so than the first part. Told from America, the book's first part takes place in 1995 after Afisi has quit the University of Tehran; the second part -- a discussion of The Great Gatsby forming its central theme -- takes place when she was still employed there. Managing to avoid the immediate purge of disloyal and impure employees from the university, the author was constantly amidst the fire, her classes challenging not only students’ abilities to analyze texts but also their blinkered views of the world and how everything is filtered through the prism of revolutionary fervor.This culminates in a mock trial during class in which an intolerant young man as the prosecutor accuses Gatsby of being an immoral work, while a more liberal student defends the novel as its counsel. Nafisi herself sits in the trial as the book itself. In one debate, it is discussed how literature is one of the best ways of learning empathy, of putting yourself in another person's shoes, and in this way we learn how complex people are, how multifaceted and not so black and white. This can be a curb to ruthlessness; thus a moral duty to read ever more complex works; intellectually skimpy novels with black and white caricatures of characters are less likely to assist in the development this moral sense and in fact can retard it.Nafisi tells in her book's third part, this time discussing Henry James, of how it was during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war. These tempestuous two middle sections contains one of the best glimpses into the human heart of this time is when Nafisi sees the televised confession of an executed military man who had been responsible for her father's imprisonment when she was a child. No matter how much she hated the man and wished for a revenge upon him, his death even, this shaken, shell of a person, repeating the faked confession makes her feel even her own self has been cheapened.The book's fourth part, as the class turns to Jane Austen, turns its focus on the Islamic Revolution's madness when it comes to women. There are too many absurdities to cover within a short review. The banning of nail polish and makeup, the government mandated wardrobe hiding nearly all outward signs of one’s physique, the absurdity of monstrous sheets hung at beaches to segregate the sexes, not to mention the aforementioned Sharia-based nine year old marriage age. This prompts one class wit to remark, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man with or without a good fortune must be in need of a nine year old virgin wife."Which is not to say that everyone else is less oppressed. Going to a concert, one of the few frowned upon but grudgingly accepted entertainments, the crowd is reminded not to behave in a non-Islamic way, which is to say they are warned against showing any emotion or enjoyment. Imagine! A concert of wooden faced musicians, denied even the physicality of swaying or tapping their feet, playing the music of The Mambo Kings to a likewise stoic and immobile crowd. Even applause is silenced by the Revolutionary Guards who stand in attendance, ready to crush even the slightest manifestation of enjoyment.Nevertheless, Nafisi constructs her book so admirably that she turns to society as a reflection of the novels being studied. Thus Henry James' revulsion to WWI is a meditation on the Iran-Iraq war, Gatsby turns on class consciousness and what is the appropriate future of which to dream, and Austen, while dominated by the idea of marriage and male/female relationships, also circles around behavior and its contradictions between private and public.In hearing her stories, in listening to her disquisitions on what is important in novels, Nafisi reminds you of the best professors you’ve ever had. At turns insightful, funny, sensitive to the larger issues that ripple through an author’s work, and capable of expressing her beliefs directly in ways that challenge her listeners but with great respect, Nafisi has written a book that encapsulates a Great Literature class, an Iranian history class, and a good long chat with a friend. The result is nothing less than mesmerizing. show less

This is the searingly intimate memoir of a female literature professor in Iran. She tells the story of her professional career and it's untimely end as increasing governmental restrictions against women force her to resign from the university. Adrift and at loose ends as her country unravels around her, Professor Nafisi turns to literature, her familiar escape from the unfortunate state of the world. Eventually, she decides to hold a secret class in her home for hand-selected students. They will read and discuss banned books and devote themselves to the study of great works and thereby transcend their lives.

As the narrator lovingly recounts the struggles and dangers of her life and her students' lives, she also delves into the lessons show more learned from each great writer. She also teaches by example how to love a work of fiction based on its merits outside the moral structures of one's society. Despite the foreign natures of such works which describe places well outside their experience, they are still able to relate to and appreciate the characters they read about and even hope to emulate them.

This book is very moving and hits especially close to home due to recent political events in my own country. It's terrifying to realize how easily rights once extended can be removed by the state. This book also serves as a college level course on a number of novels, providing deep readings and insights about the impact of famous works and why their influence remains so potent. show less

Late to the party on this one, but happy to have finally gotten to it. Combination memoir and literary criticism, Nafisi uses her college teaching career and a clandestine class she taught for young women on literature as the structure for a meditation on the volatile times she lived through in Iran. Her main topics for novels include those of Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. I'm perplexed by the reviews below here complaining about not enjoying Nafisi's book because they hadn't read any books by the four featured authors. Nafisi's book is blurbed and described everywhere as a rumination on those authors - why pick up this book if you don't have any interest in those authors? Even I, an avowed James avoider, had my curiosity show more piqued by Nafisi's discussions of his work. And she had wonderfully unique insights on the others.

The bonus here is the history and cultural primer on Iran in the 1970s and 1980s. Though sometimes confusing, it's nice to have a broader understanding of the diverse and complicated state of affairs that only featured as sound bytes on the nightly news - the primary source of information in those days. And it was so much more complicated than I ever considered. I've been looking for a good book on the Middle East, and this one served as a wonderful introduction. My only criticism is that Nafisi's prose can sometimes be a little dense - I'd hate to have been required to keep up with her in class.

4 bones!!!!
Recommended show less

I actually took notes when I read Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. The book contains so much information and so many thought-provoking quotes, I had to make it easy for me to find them later on. For what, I had no idea. but it seemed important. In reading this book, I felt as though I had entered a world foreign to me, but met a character in the form of the narrator who is someone familiar–a voracious reader and a teacher.

Nafisi’s memoir takes place when she, an Iranian moves back to Iran from the United States, where she attends grad school . She decides to go home at what turns out to be a time of change and danger–during the Revolution.

What starts out as a hopeful movement, becomes an authoritarian anti-Western show more repressive government. Nafisi witnesses the controls tightening as the abuse of power becomes more chaotic. She writes of men and women being tortured and killed, of women sexually abused and raped and blamed. The powerless are doomed.

Although she starts out teaching in the university, soon Nafisi is expelled for refusing to wear a veil. She comes back for a time, but ultimately, she resigns and takes her teaching underground. She teaches literature in her living room to female students. It’s very hush-hush as they are all in danger if discovered.

What did I learn from this book?
The structure of Nafisi’s memoir is very unique. Because the book is about teaching literature, she gives the book shape by forming sections around the books they read: “Lolita”; “Gatsby”; “James”; and “Austen.” She makes connections between the literature studied during the section and what is happening to the characters in the book and to Iran. Her clever structure is a good example of a memoir structured thematically.
Until I read this book, I didn’t realize how little I knew about Iranian culture and about the Revolution. I’d seen Ayatollah Khomeini on TV often in the early 80s, and it was if a dark spirit entered the room each time he filled the screen. But this made me turn from Iran and not seek to learn more.
Most importantly, Nafisi shows how naive and idealistic she and her fellow Iranian students were when the Shah was in power. They believed that revolution was necessary and would help Iran and its people. But their dream turned into a nightmare. The book shows how we have to be careful what we wish for. A promising course might not lead to freedom and happiness, but to a dangerous theocracy.
Although I ended up with 5 typed pages of valuable notes from this book, I remember one passage by rote. In the Gatsby section, a character says:

[The Great Gatsby] is an amazing book . . . . It teaches you to value your dreams but to be wary of them also, to look for integrity in unusual places. “

I’ve taken on this quote as a personal mantra. show less

E alla fine pagano sempre le donne.
La Repubblica Islamica dell'Iran nasce sulle ceneri dell'impero di Persia, che l'ultimo shah volle modernizzare a colpi di divieto e di torture, senza tenere conto di alcun genere di sensibilità.
Il simbolo di quella occidentalizzazione forzata divenne il divieto del velo islamico, così come l'imposizione dello stesso velo è diventato il simbolo della successiva islamizzazione forzata.
Sotto la poco incoraggiante luce di questi avvenimenti alcune donne si interrogano sulla letteratura, Nabokov, Henry James, Jane Austen, ma soprattutto si interrogano su loro stess e su quanto sono disposte a trasformare la propria visione di se stesse per aderire ai discutibili principi che vengono loro imposti.