by Azar Nafisi
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Product Description
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.
Amazon.com
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
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Average Customer Review:
33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
 Absolutely not politically correct, 2008-07-01
The author was a specialist for Western literature in the Iran of the Islamic Republic. That was of course a no-no and she lost her university job in 1995. Before finally emigrating to the US (where she is now probably a suspect as a sleeper of some kind), she did a remarkably courageous thing: she continued teaching girls in English language literature at home for two more years. The main message of the book is the story of the lessons and of the fate of the girls in a country that has gone back by milleniums in civic freedoms.
I was reminded of this book, which I read a few years ago, by the discussions after I posted reviews of the novel and the first film Lolita. I realized that there are more interpretations of Lolita, the novel, than was mentioned in the discussion. For the group of women who read the book in Tehran, what was in the forefront was that somebody who has been forced to be with somebody that she didn't want to be with, can rise up and escape.
In a way though, Lolita is not really the main subject of the study group. The book ought to have been called Reading the Great Gatsby in Tehran or reading Jane Austen. Both take a lot more space. Obviously the title was chosen by marketing criteria. The title with Lolita sounds more interesting and it has a much better rhythm.
I am as often puzzled by the reactions here in Amazon. Where do all the negative reviews come from? Does the Iran have a fifth column of literate people who can write reviews?
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Reading Lolita in Tehran in Ohio on tape. , 2008-06-30
I avoided this book for fear of voyeurism. Abuse of children, or the artful justification of it in even an attenuated form, is not something I want to encourage, and I assumed the point of the title was, ¨How paradoxical to be reading something so naughty with veils over our faces!¨
Fortunately that was wrong. Nafisi seems rather to be using a story about the exploitation of one girl, as a literary doorway into a society in which all girls are treated badly. That was what I was hoping for, in finally picking up the CD of this book (which I listened to while driving through Amish country in Ohio!) -- to learn more about life in Iran from a sensitive critic of the regime.
Overall, the book is good enough. Nafisi's descriptions of her students, and the other characters, are acute. You do come to understand what life is like for women in the most radical Islamic countries -- at least for women educated to think like Westerners.
But at the same time, I didn't always get the feeling of getting inside the thought processes of another culture, here. Nafisi does not always seem to mediate a general view of life for women in Iran, but more of ¨what an American forced to live among Islamic Leninists¨ (see Naipaul) would feel. Her description of Islam is so uniformly negative, one does not much get inside the head of its proponents -- unlike with Naipaul.
My other complaint was that the book dragged at times. The author has descriptive talent, but sometimes lets it get away from her. Sometimes Nafisi gives the readers too much interior dialogue -- read with a rather gloomy seriousness, in the CD version.
All in all, while good, I'd probably prefer a shorter version of this book. Maybe a printed version, which one can skip forward at times, would in this case be preferable.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
For the Women of Iran, 2008-06-13
This is an extremely important book because it gives the women of Iran a voice, and one that has been heard around the world. This book is many things: a discussion of English literature, a memoir, a history of the last 30 years in Iran, and more. It is especially worthwhile for those interested in women's issues, Iran, and literature. Just a word of warning--for those not familiar with the writings of Jane Austen, Nabokov, Henry James, or Fitzgerald--parts of this book may not make much sense. May there be freedom and democracy one day in Iran.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 A women's jorney through war, totalitarianism and great works of fiction, 2008-06-08
Reading Lolita in Tehran is a journey through a warn torn nation, through the eyes of several woman who struggle with who they are in relation to what's going on around them. Their sanity is preserved through their deep exploration of great works of fiction from Nabokov to Fitzgerald to Henry James to Jane Austen. This is a thoughtful book from an author who seems far more in love with reading than writing.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Couldn't make it , 2008-04-08
After reading reviews I decided to give this book a try. Unfortunately I couldn't make it very far. This book was beyond boring and every time I picked it up it would put me to sleep. Maybe if I was able to push through the beginning of the book it would have gotten better but I just couldn't. Which is unusual for me because I try to finish all books that I start reading.
I would definitely not recommend this book to anyone.
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