Reading Lolita in Tehran

While I was down in California, I borrowed the book Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. Here's the Amazon editorial review:

An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people's lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color." Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of "morality guards," the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became "essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity," she writes.

Threaded into the memoir are trenchant discussions of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors who provided the women with examples of those who successfully asserted their autonomy despite great odds. The great works encouraged them to strike out against authoritarianism and repression in their own ways, both large and small: "There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom," she writes. In short, the art helped them to survive. --Shawn Carkonen

I personally didn't really care for the book. I found it a bit disjointed as she jumps from her "class" to literary examination to various times in her personal history. She is an English Literature professor and I know some folks disagreed with her interpretation of some of the works, but my personal view is that there is no right or wrong on interpretation and that's the beauty of literature. I did enjoy the glimpses into the effects on women of the Iranian Revolution. However, in my opinion, this doesn't go very deep except to correlate the women to Nabokov's Lolita as trapped victims. That's all good, but it didn't go beyond that. My other main issue with the book is how the author views herself, her role, and her own perceptions. It may have been unintended, but it seemed to me that she constantly remembered situations with herself as the heroine or only maverick in a field of sheep. The best take away from the book for me was one quote from Nabokov - "Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form".

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