Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Stranger Than!)

by Azar Nafisi

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. 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. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, 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. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran.

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 of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense.

Azar Nafisi’s luminous 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. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice.

Praise for Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women who must meet in secret to explore the forbidden fiction of the West. It is at once a celebration of the power of the novel and a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped. The ayatollahs don’ t know it, but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic.”—Geraldine Brooks, author of Nine Parts of Desire

• ISBN10: 081297106X
• ISBN13: 9780812971064
• Publish Date: 30 December 2003 (first published 25 March 2003)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Random House USA Inc
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 384
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780812971064

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

Totalitarian regimes tend to believe everything about reading is bad. An uninformed, incurious population is much easier to control. Theocracies, too, tend to be interested in suppression of alternate ideas. So a totalitarian theocracy, like the modern-day Republic of Iran, is doubly suspicious of books. So when native Iranian but American-educated former university professor Azar Nafisi starts teaching Western literary classics to a small group of past students in her home, she's doing more than assembling a book club with promising young minds. She can't even get enough black market copies of Lolita for everyone to have one...some of the girls use photocopies to read from.

Nafisi uses four major works of the literary canon as lenses through which to tell her story: the titular Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice. She touches relatively briefly on her childhood in Iran, her emigration to the United States to study, and her brief, unhappy first marriage followed by her second, much better one. The book spends much more time discussing life when she returns to Iran with her husband and begins teaching as the Islamic Revolution unfolds, and the restrictions on female and literary life under the ayatollahs.

Nafisi has a unique perspective on the Islamic Revolution as both insider (she was born and spent a large portion of her childhood in Iran, and married a fellow Persian and moved back) and outsider (she spent her early adulthood in the United States and got a Western education before she came back). It's fascinating and horrifying to read about how women's roles and rights were pushed back and back as time went on...Nafisi is never run out of the workplace per se, but she is threatened with an anonymous note and was subject to constant harassment over not wearing her headscarf properly, and eventually decides that continuing to teach is more trouble than it's worth. As she watches her students struggle to make their own lives and raises her daughter, it becomes obvious to her that she can't stay in Iran even though she doesn't want to leave, either.

It's useful to come in with a working comprehension of the novels Nafisi focuses on, since she discusses them and how their themes relate to situations she deals with at length. I'd read three of the four coming in (no Daisy Miller for me), and while it's certainly possible to understand the book without the literary references, it's definitely richer and deeper if you can follow along. For the most part I enjoyed the way she used the focus novels, though I did get a little irritated in the section on Lolita when she claimed repeatedly that she wasn't comparing the ayatollahs to Humbert and Iranian women to Lolita and then went on to do just that over and over. I think it's an interesting and valid way to look at Lolita, but if you're going to go there don't pretend that's not what you're trying to do. On the whole, though, it's a very interesting memoir, especially for a bookish audience!

[ambiancereads]

absolutely amazing

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir of books read by Literature professor Azar Nafisi’s literature class during the revolution (1978-1981) up until her departure in 1997. Divided into four sections “Lolita”, “Gatsby”, “James”, and “Austen”, this memoir explores the lives of the students in a private literature class and the books that brought them all together. This is an inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, and a moving look at the power of art and its ability to change and improve people’s lives.

I really enjoyed this book; the blend of literary criticism and memoir was really what hooked me. I especially loved the first part that focused on Lolita and the themes of oppression, authority figures trying to assert their dominance through events and a runaway convict. It was just an interesting insight from these Iranian students. It really made me want to read Lolita again and try to see what more I can get out of the book; luckily for me I might get that chance soon with the Literary Exploration book club.

I didn’t feel as strong of a connection with the other parts of this book, but I think I was just blown away by the insights into Lolita that the others didn’t have the same impact. The Great Gatsby looked at dreams and adultery all from the Iranian prospective. While Gatsby is about the American dream it was interesting to see it from a totalitarian mindset. James looks at some works of Henry James during the time of the Iran-Iraq war and the government who wants to control the liberal-minded. Lastly Austin looks at Jane Austin novels as well as the idea of abusive husbands, blindness and empathy.

This book comes together really well; you get to know these Iranian students and as well as explore some interesting ideas about the books from a perspective completely different to your own. While I would have preferred more literary criticism, I really got a lot of joy from reading this. There is a strong feminist theme throughout this book (since most of the students were women) that I suspect was the main draw card for many of the female readers of this book, and rightly so, this was an interesting look at these women. But for me, it was all about the books

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/02/10/book-review-reading-lolita-in-tehran/

[jamiereadthis]

I wanted to like it, I really did. I wanted to find it courageous and profound. It comes bearing the flag: I am an Important Book. And I think that was the trouble: so aware of its own greatness, it becomes manipulative and clichéd to a fault. I'm also hoping, maybe it was just me.