Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

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

The story of Iranian women's experiences under a totalitarian regime, told in a straightforward manner but supplemented by metaphors drawn from the Western literary canon. The author Azar Nafisi is well capable of this approach, given her Western education and background as a professor of English literature at Tehran University. Her story begins with an illicit reading group comprised of former students who met in her home in the mid-1990s, but soon moves back in time to cover her life in Iran from 1979 onward, relating the gradual tightening of controls over the country's population under Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors. The timeline becomes muddied in places, but for the most part it is chronological.

Through its clear prose and show more inviting method, this work has completely changed my image of Iran, its history and its people. I've long imagined Iran's people as hardline, but here the author describes 'Death to America' chants staged for western cameras by Iranian citizens forced or paid to participate. The Iranian Revolution was not an overnight success, resorting to force and murder in overcoming numerous protests and demonstrations by its unbelieving citizens, who even then did not foresee all that was coming: "To think that the universities could be closed down seemed as far-fetched as the possibility that women would finally succumb to wearing the veil."

I derived the most benefit from the portions offering critical study of various classic novels. Magic happens when Western literature is interpreted through the eyes of these Iranian women, providing great insight into their society through the parallels drawn. Humbert Humbert's oppression of Lolita is likened to the totalitarian regime they suffer under; moral stances in The Great Gatsby are equated with the revolutionaries; the women of Henry James' novels serve as models for quiet defiance, etc. I'd strongly recommend having read the titles most closely studied in advance (or else you won't need to): Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, Washington Square, and Pride & Prejudice. show less

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a show more celebration of the liberating power of literature. show less

I was a bit wary of this book-- how difficult can it be to generate a bestseller in the US from a critique of the poster-child of totalitarian revolutions, Iran? What kept me interested was the irony of the novel becoming so passionately important as an ethical tool in a repressive society, while in our own "open" society it is basically just more merchandise. The trial of Gatsby had me spellbound. As did, I have to say, the little details of life in a misogynarchy -- I always thought Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was kind of too incredible to be compelling, but here is its real life counterpart.

Atrocious and dumb almost beyond belief. Nafisi is a terrible, pompous writer with no conception of the complexity of the real world, and she attempts to bring this idiotic mindset to the reader. The fact that this was a bestseller bodes badly for America.

For about a quarter of Reading Lolita in Tehran I honestly believed that the bad writing must have been some sort of obscure postmodern statement, the meaning of which I had not yet grasped. I continued to wade through it in search of an explanation, trying to believe it was self-aware. But soon it became apparent that she really was writing in this ridiculous, all-over-the-map manner in earnest, attempting spectacular feat after spectacular feat of time- and tense-shifting (that show more failed just as spectacularly), and leaving out quotation marks in dialogue whenever the fancy struck her. All of this renders the book a rambling, incoherent muck of pretension. She also attempts to pump every chapter full of ornate descriptions of everything and anything regardless of its value to the story. A prudent editor could have cut "Reading Lolita in Tehran" down to half of its endless 343 pages without losing anything essential.

But really nothing in this abortion of a book is "essential." She frequently refers to a cherished metaphor comparing Iran's relationship toward its women with Humbert's relationship toward the title character in "Lolita." She writes that Iran suppresses its women's individuality for its own ends in the same way that Humbert forces Lolita into being his fantasy, never letting her escape his all-controlling narrative to become her own person. This injustice is one of the main themes of the book. And yet whenever one of the "bad guys" of RLIT comes into the picture, it becomes apparent who is casting whom in only one light. The soulless Iranian pig-men are never allowed to "say" things, they may only say them "sulkily," or "drone on triumphantly." Nafisi never even attempts to give anyone who disagrees with her vision of utopia more than one dimension; she condemns them as blindly as the censor she's so pissy about, portraying the men as red-faced babies screaming at the angelic, perfect, wonderful, articulate, elegant, soft-spoken and yet still tenacious and ever so brave girls of her class. Beyond the mangled prose, RLIT is as easy to read as Danielle Steel: the reader doesn't have to make a single judgment on anything, since Nafisi has already done that troublesome thinking for us.

Nabokov gave even Humbert a reason for his evil, if a tenuous one: his lost childhood love Annabelle. What is radical Islam's Annabelle? Don't look for real answers here. Nafisi offers only appetizing answers, ones that go down smoothly to give readers a sense of solidarity against a faceless enemy. She rightly deplores the injustices of the Iranian empire, but I don't like to think of what would go on in the kind of country run according to the oversimplified, ignorant, hypocritical thinking she demonstrates here. Compared to that, Iran looks like Disneyland.

I hope she learns how to write and how to think before she attempts another book. 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

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a wonderful book. It is a number of things: a sensitive exploration of the meaning of literature in the broader sense, with specific references to Nabokov, James, and Austen; a memoir of life teaching literature in Tehran when literature opened a window to a world different from the "reality" of the Islamic Republic; and a disquisition on the essence of totalitarian regimes, how they sap the soul, and in this case, how they particularly demean the role and humanity of women.

For Nafisi, fiction is "not a panacea" but it does offer a "critical way of appraising and grasping the world–not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires." A great novel, "heightens your senses and show more sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil." She argues that "Imagination [in literature] is equated with empathy; we can't experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic–not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels--the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them denies their existence." Nafisi maintains that in The Ambassadors (by Henry James), "we find several different kinds of courage, but the most courageous characters here are those with imagination, those who, through their imaginative faculty, can empathize with others. When you lack this kind of courage, you remain ignorant of others' feelings and needs." Tied to this are those characters in novels, and in life, that have an incapacity for "tolerance, self-reflection"; people who are "incapable of genuine dialogue."

With respect to totalitarianism itself, Nafisi refers to Nabakov's Invitation to a Beheading, in noting that it is not the actual physical pain and torture of a totalitarian regime but, "the nightmarish quality of living in an atmosphere of perpetual dread." The dread is that of falling afoul of the authorities for the most banal of infractions that could lead to humiliation, at best, and disappearance, torture and death, at worst; under the Islamic fundamentalists who came to power in Iran, there was no shortage of such actions, indeed an increase as the authorities asserted themselves and intruded into private life and private decisions in every conceivable manner. For Nafisi (and for most observers of totalitarian regimes) the "worst crime committed by the totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes." (This, for example, was the final straw for Sandor Marai's decision that he could not live under the Communists, see his Memoirs of Hungary.)

Under the Islamic Revolution, the place of women became increasingly difficult and intolerable.

"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 the new constitution, was the family-protection law, which guaranteed women's rights at home and at work. The age of marriage was lowered to nine–eight and half lunar years we were told; adultery and prostitution were to be punished by stoning to death; and women, under law, were considered to have half the worth of men. Sharia law replaced the existing system of jurisprudence, and became the norm. 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."

For Nafisi, after eleven years in Tehran, the stifling atmosphere, the constant struggle to teach with some degree of openness and curiosity, the intrusion by authorities in all aspects of life, the lack of personal choice, the crippling of growth and happiness in women in particular, all conspired to lead her to decide to leave Iran, with her husband and two children, for the United States. This was not an easy decision given her love for the country and many of the people, and she details sensitively how she wrestled with it and finally came to her decision.

A book well worth reading. show less