Status
Call number
Collections
Publication
Description
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.… (more)
Media reviews
User reviews
To read this book was, for me, slightly disorientating: for I felt like I was reading dystopian fiction, having a window into these women's lives under the regime. Yet
I guess what hits hardest about the novel was that prior to Khomeini's accession, women were on a similarly liberated footing in Iran as in the West:
"At the start of the 20th Century, the age of marriage in Iran - 9, according to sharia laws - was changed to 13 and then later to 18. My mother had chosen whom she wanted to marry and she had been one of the first six women elected to Parliament in 1963. When I was growing up, in the 1960s, there was little difference between my rights and the rights of women in Western democracies. But it was not the fashion then to think that our culture was not compatible with modern democracy, that there were Western and Islamic versions of democracy and human rights. We all wanted opportunities and freedom. That is why we supported revolutionary change - we were demanding more rights, not fewer.
I married on the eve of revolution, a man I loved. [...] 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born five years later, the laws had regressed to what they had been before my grandmother's time: the first law to be repealed, months before the ratification of a new constitution, was the family-protection law, which guaranteed women's rights at home and at work. [...] 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. One of them [...] had been abroad at the time of the revolution and remained in exile. [...] The other, the minister of education and my former high school principal, was put in a sack and stoned or shot to death." (Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi, p.261-262)
With its atmosphere of surveillance, propaganda and morality squads, it felt like I was reading something along the lines of Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, because it seems so alien. As you can probably tell, I didn't know much about Iran, (and indeed, still know passing little), but have been inspired to find out more.
I liked the way that books are reference points, memoirs, to the book. Nafisi taught literature and her enthusiasm for the texts translates well, (to the point I have a new list of books I wish to read or re-read) while also throwing the repressiveness of the regime into sharp relief.
Another one I liked is: A novel is not an
She uses this logic with her own writing, drawing you in to revolutionary Iran. Deftly comparing and contrasting nightmarish, totalitarian scenes of the Islamic Republic’s ‘morality guards’ that feel like something straight out of 1984 with scenes and analysis from novels as diverse as Lolita and The Great Gatsby.
A very enjoyable and one of a kind book.
She strikes me as a very insightful, loving, brave woman who is very saddened by the politicizing of religion, the lack of women's rights in Iran, and continual upheavals and revolutions there. She wishes that others could gain insights about human experience through close readings of literature, bemoaning the lack of empathy and shortsightedness of "revolutionaries" in Iran. There's a recommended reading list in the back of her book. If you haven't read at least the four I've listed above, it will be very difficult to make heads or tails of her memoir.
"Forcing religion makes the decision to be faithful meaningless." This book is a memoir in books. The author
I loved the way Nafisi wove together personal memoir with literary criticism. Her passion for books comes through one every page and her love for "her girls," whom she learns from as much as she teaches, is also crystal clear. She manages to show how books of imagination became a salve for them, a way out of the mundane terrors of their everyday lives. Moving and lyrical and sorrowful and wise, this is a lovely, lovely book.
As the religious fundamentalists consolidated control, life became more and more constrained, especially for women. Nafisi had been teaching English literature at the University of Tehran, but was fired for refusing to wear the veil. For several years she met weekly with a small group of female students in her home. They discussed books and for those few hours were free to express themselves authentically. Eventually, Nafisi (as well as several of her students) left Iran for the West. She became a professor at Johns Hopkins University.
This "memoir in books" is divided into four sections: Lolita, Gatsby, James, and Austen. The Lolita chapters are dedicated to descriptions of the private study group and its participants, as well as a discussion of the book and others by Nabokov, particularly Invitation to a Beheading. The Gatsby chapters begin roughly eleven years before and deal primarily with her years teaching at the University of Tehran and in particular a trial her class held of Jay Gatsby, in abstentia. The Henry James chapters pick up with her expulsion from the University of Tehran and deal with life during the eight year Iran-Iraq War and her decision to resume teaching (at the University of Allameh Tabatabai). The Jane Austen chapters return to the study group and Nafisi's decision to emigrate.
Nafisi's descriptions of life in Iran after the revolution are particularly accessible to Western readers because she was coming from a secular, US-educated perspective. What makes this memoir a bit more difficult is described by Nafisi herself:
I am too much of an academic: I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narratives without pontificating. Although that is in fact my urge—to narrate, to reinvent myself along with all those others.
The integration of literary criticism into the memoir is interesting, and makes it unique, but presupposes some familiarity with the novels and authors she discusses. At times the literary framework works wells, at other times it feels a bit forced. I found the James chapters the most difficult, probably because that was the author I was least familiar with.
I suppose my largest frustration comes from the way that the discussions of literature were integrated so fully in some ways, and then ignored so completely in the ways that (I felt) mattered. There'd be whole passages from Nabokov, Fitzgerald and the other authors represented, along with explanations, explications, and discussions of the literature, as one would find in any good classroom covering the books. But, why were these discussions necessary in such complete detail here? Essentially, that's what I was left wondering. Perhaps some of the bits and pieces would be more necessary for a reader who is unfamiliar with the works--I'm really not sure, since I have read them--but my interest was in knowing how and why these books in particular mattered so much to the women at the center of the story. What was clear was why reading mattered, but why these books in particular? And how did they impact the women who were fully enmeshed in Tehran and its customs, as opposed to the academic author? This, I'm not at all sure of, though I'd expected it to be a large part of the work.
At too many points, I felt like I was reading the equivalent of a journal put into prose, and that the only moves beyond that journal were attempts to explain the author's feelings about Austen, Nabokov, etc. But, for that, I could have read books about these authors and their books, as opposed to this memoir that I believed would allow for connection to another world and society, and to show the reach of these books. Yet, in the end, I'm afraid I was sorely disappointed.
What can I say? Would I recommend this book? Probably not. Would I read another work by Nafisi? Again, probably not.
It was interesting to read this immediately after reading Persepolis, a child's perspective on the same oppressive theocracy.
That rant aside, it's not a bad book. I found the last three sections ("Gatsby" on national dreams, "James" on the totalitarian regime that swept into power, and "Austen" on the role of women) more readable and interesting. Perhaps because I have never read Lolita, nor anything by Nabokov, I didn't grasp the "Lolita" section that well. The recounting of the formation of the study group was clear enough, but the constant allusions and comparisons to events in Lolita left me with a feeling that I was missing something and, therefore, a big disengaged.
The book has a fault or two. I couldn't help but feel that the author's agenda left no room for balance. I don't mean to imply that I think that things weren't exactly as she portrayed. It was more of a doubt based upon her tone—I couldn't help but wonder that, if there were to be another side to the story, would it have appeared? Being neither Muslim nor Iranian, I cannot begin to hazard an opinion.
I would have liked to have learned more about the reactions of her students to the works they read and to know how they thought the class did or did not shape their subsequent lives. I had a history professor who used to say, "The thing not to forget after you tell what happened is to tell 'So what?'" I didn't feel we got much of that beyond Ms. Nafisi, herself.
Using four or five books of Western literature as a foil for society may or may not be a good idea...I think it only worked moderately well in this particular instance. I question whether non-Western thinking, particularly such thinking that absolutely rejects the West, can really be explained in terms of Western literature. Nonetheless, it's fairly easy to overlook some of those portions and focus on events and thoughts.
A good book, worth the read, likely to be highly charged emotionally if you are in any way connected to the environment in which it is set.
For about a quarter of Reading Lolita in
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.
The insights into life in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran – a broader, friendlier look at the country than what we usually get through the news – were
Still, this is light reading – something to be packed along to the beach or read in snippets on your morning commute. For radical political insights, or deep and involved character development, you’d have to look elsewhere.
Would Nafisi have been as brilliantly engrossed in reading, teaching literature and writing had she not lived in Iran? I don’t know. Certainly the living backdrop of Iran’s changing history, politics, revolutionaries, misguided leaders, angry youth, misogyny, ongoing violence and cruelty, and intense hatred (or more likely envy) of all things Western contribute to the energy and soul of Nafisi’s teaching at a few Iranian universities, and her writing.
And when living in Iran became a living hell, particularly for women, Nafisi’s private lit class for women in her home became a life-line of normalcy for her students and herself. Works by Nabokov, James, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Flaubert, and other Western writers provide a feast of freedom to discuss anything and everything. Literature becomes both their escape, and a way of dealing with their troubles. They learn (from the many characters analyzed) their options and choices in living wisely in very difficult circumstances. By describing what she, Nafisi, learns about her students connects us, the readers to them: we are in the room with them; sharing their confidences, fears, heartaches, triumphs and celebrations.
While painful to read about the limitations, realities and anxiety of life in Iran, bombings from Iraq, imprisonment and murder of dissidents (including some of Nafisi’s students), the humiliation of women forced into wearing chadors and veils, receiving body searches at public checkpoints, teachers and students putting up with university sycophants out of fear of arrest, Nafisi makes sure we understand the beauty of Iran and richness of Iranian life. She and many of her students have strong family bonds, love and support, which extend to friends, neighbors and colleagues making life bearable.
Outstanding read!