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Loading... Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (original 2003; edition 2008)by Azar Nafisi (Author)
Work InformationReading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (2003)
  
Books about Books (27) » 17 more Female Protagonist (124) Books Read in 2016 (703) Women in Islam (17) Female Author (507) Unread books (324) Books Read in 2004 (149) 501 Must-Read Books (363) Women's Stories (83) No current Talk conversations about this book.  Thebeautifulsea | Aug 5, 2022 |  Wonderful. (  ) ZannaZori | Aug 3, 2022 | Powerfully moving story. ( ) BurrowK | Jul 31, 2022 | his book is a series of reminisces of Nafisi's life as a professor of literature in Iran. It is a fascinating view into the life of a woman who was unsatisfied with the life she was forced to lead there. Just as important as her life is the life of her students and their reactions to the books she had them read. Nafisi also conveys that the tragedy of the laws, at least as applied to women, is that they tried to erase individual personalities. Reading Lolita in Tehran was a good and, at times, emotionally challenging book. eri_kars | Jul 10, 2022 | 28. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi reader: the author published: 2003 format: 17:36 audible audiobook (356 pages in paperback) acquired: May 11 listened : May 11 – Jun 10 rating: 4½ genre/style: Memoir theme: random audio locations: Tehran 1979-1995 about the author: Iranian-American author born in Tehran in 1948. She studied abroad from age 13 and emigrated to the US in 1997. Nafisi, who claims decent of 800 years of Nafisi family writers, was educated abroad from age 13. She returned to Iran in 1979 to teach English literature, just in time for the Islamic Revolution and its associated dystopian oppression. She had some protectors, a spouse with a stable income, and she was mostly able to continue to teach within the Islamic Republic, despite all its insane treatment of women and its censorship and hatred of the west. When she was prohibited from teaching, she started her private reading group of former students, and they started with reading Lolita. She had quite an experience, and the book covers it all - the revolution, street riots, arrests, executions, invasive law enforcement and its intense focus on preventing women from committing the sin of doing anything or appearing an anyway that might possibly make any young man aroused, and also constant bombing by Iraqi bombers. Meanwhile she taught, kept teaching, had children, and kept reading. Her students would be arrested at demonstrations, or even on vacation, and then tortured in unknown ways, and sometimes summarily executed. Her colleagues faced the same threats, some executed on the roadside. And she processed it all through literature. If you believe her take, she was very bold. During the early uncertain swings in the revolution she had her class put [The Great Gatsby] on trial, the revolutionary students prosecuting, and other students defending, and she played the defendant, the book. Her literary critiques become commentaries on the repression of this Islamic revolution - insightful to both it and to the books. (Beyond Nabokov and Fitzgerald, she also has a theme on Henry James and Jane Austen - actually it was Austen who led to her reading group). Certainly, her literary take is unique, and tied to these experiences, and amplified by them. These English classics become far more intense for her and her students than for any normal reader. A well-quoted line struck me near the end. Shortly before leaving Tehran, a literary friend tells her that when she gets to the US, “You will not be able to write about Austen without writing about us, about this place where you rediscovered Austen … The Austen you know is so irretrievably linked to this place…” This very long book is such an awkward thing, and yet I agree with the conventional wisdom on this. It's terrific, even if awkwardly terrific. It stumbles in so many ways. For example, her efforts to conceal identities make the fake identities confusing, so much so that I was completed baffled as to who was who. I quickly gave up trying to follow. (She reads the audio herself, in her Iranian accent, which also awkwardly works well.) But it's unique and tragic, passionate, flawed, and also makes for a creative use of literary criticism. Recommended if intense literary responses and the Iranian revolution interest. 2022 https://www.librarything.com/topic/341027#7870718 (  ) dchaikin | Jun 26, 2022 |
 The charismatic passion in the book is not simply for literature itself but for the kind of inspirational teaching of it which helps students to teach themselves by applying their own intelligence and emotions to what they are reading. [A]n eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction--on the refuge from ideology that art can offer to those living under tyranny, and art's affirmative and subversive faith in the voice of the individual. A spirited tribute both to the classics of world literature and to resistance against oppression. Has as a student's study guideHas as a teacher's guide
This is the story of Azar Nafisi's dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. They were unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Nafisi's account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl or protests and demonstrations. Azar Nafisi's tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women's lives in revolutionary Iran. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)820.9 — Literature English {except North American} English literature History, description, critical appraisal of works in more than one formLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.62)
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― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Sorry but this was a DNF for me and several members of my book club. I liked the subject matter and had been looking forward to reading it but it was all over the place and jumped around to much for my tastes. (