Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
#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.
A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY
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.
A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY
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.
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Community Reviews
Every account of societies slipping into oppression or reaching the peak of their power reveals unmistakable signs, and these signs are often strikingly similar. Alarmingly, in each instance, onlookers have remained silent, convinced it could never affect them. "Reading Lolita in Tehran" exemplifies this troubling phenomenon, serving as clear evidence that history repeats itself when we fail to learn from it.
When we look at the experiences of the characters in the book, we see important themes and deep emotions. However, the academic style of writing can sometimes dull the impact of these stories. Still, Despite this, the work serves as a powerful and essential reminder of the importance of standing against tyranny. It encourages us to think, get involved, and take action before we end up on the wrong side of history.
A powerful memoir by an Iranian professor of literature who found herself subject to the sudden harsh rules imposed after the Iranian revolution in 1979. Nafasi relates the changing and increasingly highly charged atmosphere in her classes at the University of Tehran, where some students vocally decried the books being studied (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabakov) as corrupting of Islamic values.
After Nafisi quits her post because she refuses to wear the veil in the university, she begins private literature classes in her home with a variety of her most promising students. In discussing themes of personal freedom, the meaning of democracy and romance, Nafisi shows the often conflicting views of her students, some of whom are religious Muslims, and others secular.
I found the book most compelling as Nafisi wrote about the changing social environment in Tehran, showing what a shock the Islamic revolution had come to a cosmopolitan city that had been very Westernized and had no interest in becoming ruled by Islamic law. This hit women especially hard, as they had to cover from head to toe and whose personal freedoms were oppressively limited. Nafisi repeats the sentiment that "I had become irrelevant," as her freedom to teach and write was increasingly limited.
After another fruitless argument with one Islamic student, she writes: "A stern ayatollah, a blind and improbably philosopher-king, had decided to impose his dream on a country and a people and to recreate us in his own myopic vision. So he had formulated an ideal of me as a Muslim woman, as a Muslim woman teacher. . . and in refusing to accept that idea, we were taking not a political stance but an existential one. . . . It was not that piece of cloth that I rejected, it was the transformation being imposed upon me that made me look in the mirror and hate the stranger I had become."
I could have done without quite so much English lit deconstruction, and it was a bit hard to keep all the characters straight, as she includes more than half a dozen very distinct women in her circle. Very odd, to me, was the total lack of any discussion about her own spiritual beliefs, in a book dedicated to the sad unraveling of a culture where strict religious doctrine is harshly imposed on everyone.
After Nafisi quits her post because she refuses to wear the veil in the university, she begins private literature classes in her home with a variety of her most promising students. In discussing themes of personal freedom, the meaning of democracy and romance, Nafisi shows the often conflicting views of her students, some of whom are religious Muslims, and others secular.
I found the book most compelling as Nafisi wrote about the changing social environment in Tehran, showing what a shock the Islamic revolution had come to a cosmopolitan city that had been very Westernized and had no interest in becoming ruled by Islamic law. This hit women especially hard, as they had to cover from head to toe and whose personal freedoms were oppressively limited. Nafisi repeats the sentiment that "I had become irrelevant," as her freedom to teach and write was increasingly limited.
After another fruitless argument with one Islamic student, she writes: "A stern ayatollah, a blind and improbably philosopher-king, had decided to impose his dream on a country and a people and to recreate us in his own myopic vision. So he had formulated an ideal of me as a Muslim woman, as a Muslim woman teacher. . . and in refusing to accept that idea, we were taking not a political stance but an existential one. . . . It was not that piece of cloth that I rejected, it was the transformation being imposed upon me that made me look in the mirror and hate the stranger I had become."
I could have done without quite so much English lit deconstruction, and it was a bit hard to keep all the characters straight, as she includes more than half a dozen very distinct women in her circle. Very odd, to me, was the total lack of any discussion about her own spiritual beliefs, in a book dedicated to the sad unraveling of a culture where strict religious doctrine is harshly imposed on everyone.
Wonderful perspective of life in ~1979 Iran. Especially from the point of view of a woman. Brings gratitude for the rights and freedom Americans possess, at least overtly
CRANKY'S REVIEW OF READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN: A MEMOIR IN BOOKS, BY AZAR NAFISI
We came into this book with open eyes: a book with a title such as this wasn't likely to be light reading and that turned out resoundingly to be the case, but more than this, it was a moving, enlightening and prejudice-busting read.
The book begins and ends with an invite-only women's book group that meets in the home of a retired University English Literature lecturer's home in Tehran. Challenging Western stereotypes of fully-veiled women from the start, the opening chapters were especially powerful, where the book group attendees peeled off their veils, kimonos and chadors to reveal young women as individual as we are, some into fashion, others not, some married, others not, some devoutly religious, others not; all of them with a high intellect, strong opinions and a thirst for English literature.
The middle sections of the book describe the author's journey from strident political activist student in liberal 1970's Iran to working as an English Literature lecturer in universities while under the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini. This makes for difficult reading: her descriptions of trying to come to terms with being compelled by the State, against her will, to be fully-veiled in public are painfully visceral. Her descriptions of civil war are also highly personal: living as a young mother in a state of constant fear of bombing, in the knowledge that the state would have actively prevented any attempts at rescue if a bomb had landed on her home. All the while, she had to try to teach her students English Literature in an atmosphere of steadily increasing state-sanctioned oppression of women in every area of their public lives. The admirable and courageous young women students in her classes, born into this oppression, still turn up to class in the search for something nobler and more stimulating, and sometimes take huge chances to participate in their studies and lead full lives, which sometimes fail and land them in jail or worse. The book group arises from the impossibility of teaching English Literature in a mixed class with male religious zealots threatening to report other students for not judging the female characters to be 'bad women': the women who stay silent during the class are suddenly able to voice their own opinions and speak freely.
The book's four sections are framed in line with four English literary themes: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott-Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen, and the action reflects the themes in its section to a greater or lesser extent. The framing of the gradual spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the section where students are reading The Great Gatsby was thought by some of us to work particularly well: the author uses a section where Scott-Fitzgerald reveals an affair with great subtlety in the Great Gatsby to demonstrate that in great literature, you feel and observe rather than are told the facts, and she pairs this with descriptions of events in her life that illustrate the gradual erosion of women's rights and status in the developing regime – for example, the first time she encounters a male student move his arm away from her hand when she goes to touch it. We agreed that it helped to be familiar with the authors and novels in these four sections and that we were probably missing a lot of subtleties when we hadn't read them.
This is not a book you can read quickly and only a couple of us had finished the book prior to our meeting. The author's measured descriptions of the horrors of everyday life in a country that had, at the time, effectively waged war on its own people knocked the stuffing out of us. Some of us disliked the switching of style from memoir to literary criticism, and the movement of the narrative out of the book group and into memoir. Even those of us who hadn't read very far, however, agreed that no matter how we felt about style or structure, the content of this book was too important and had too much to teach to be left unfinished.
We gave the book an average rating of 8.5 out of 10.
This could have been a five star book if someone had edited it down to half the size and given it more structure. Part of the lack of editing was telling about everyone she knew in Iran instead of just closely following a few of the book club people. Unlike some other reviewers I enjoyed the literary thoughts on Lolita, The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice but absolutely do not read this this book until you have read those three (I have) otherwise you'll be somewhat lost and this book is tough enough without that.
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