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
From Publishers Weekly
This book transcends categorization as memoir, literary criticism or social history, though it is superb as all three. Literature professor Nafisi returned to her native Iran after a long education abroad, remained there for some 18 years, and left in 1997 for the United States, where she now teaches at Johns Hopkins. Woven through her story are the books she has taught along the way, among them works by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James and Austen. She casts each author in a new light, showing, for instance, how to interpret The Great Gatsby against the turbulence of the Iranian revolution and how her students see Daisy Miller as Iraqi bombs fall on Tehran Daisy is evil and deserves to die, one student blurts out. Lolita becomes a brilliant metaphor for life in the Islamic republic. The desperate truth of Lolita's story is... the confiscation of one individual's life by another, Nafisi writes. The parallel to women's lives is clear: we had become the figment of someone else's dreams. A stern ayatollah, a self-proclaimed philosopher-king, had come to rule our land.... And he now wanted to re-create us. Nafisi's Iran, with its omnipresent slogans, morality squads and one central character struggling to stay sane, recalls literary totalitarian worlds from George Orwell's 1984 to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Nafisi has produced an original work on the relationship between life and literature.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Lolita in Tehran? Yes, and plenty of other Western classics, read and discussed by a group of women who met secretly with Nafisi, an instructor at the University of Tehran until she was expelled in 1997 for shunning the veil and left the country. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From AudioFile
READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN is a literary and audio masterpiece. The book is Azar Nafisi's brilliant, evocative, chilling, and highly literary memoir of life as a woman in Iran under the current repressive government. Although Nafisi focuses on the secret meetings at her home with several female former students, during which they read and discuss banned works of Western literature, the book is also a portrait of a life of fear and optimism at a time when hope is elusive. Lisette Lecat's reading is magnificent. She reads with an elegance and authenticity that permit listeners to feel as though they are also in Nafisi's home. In addition, Lecat handles with ease and authority the passages in which Nafisi explains the intricacies of many works of literature. Nafisi's memoir is destined to become a classic. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
Nafisi, a former English professor at the University of Tehran, decided to hold secret, private classes at her home after the rules at the university became too restrictive. She invited seven insightful, talented women to participate in the class. At first they were tentative and reserved, but gradually they bonded over discussions of Lolita, Pride and Prejudice, and A Thousand and One Nights. They neither draw exact parallels between the texts and their lives nor find them completely foreign. Nafisi observes: "Lolita was not a critique of the Islamic Republic, but it went against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives." Nafisi mixes literary analyses in with her observations of the growing oppressive environment of the Islamic Republic of Iran: women are forced to wear the veil at university and eventually separated in class from men. Bombs fall outside while Nafisi tries to conduct class. Nafisi's determination and devotion to literature shine through, and her book is an absorbing look at primarily Western classics through the eyes of women and men living in a very different culture. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
?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
?I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi?s account of how she defied, and helped others to defy, radical Islam?s war against women. Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about the ordeals of freedom?as well as a stirring account of the pleasures and deepening of consciousness that result from an encounter with great literature and with an inspired teacher.?
?Susan Sontag
?When I first saw Azar Nafisi teach, she was standing in a university classroom in Tehran, holding a bunch of red fake poppies in one hand and a bouquet of daffodils in the other, and asking, "What is kitsch?" Now, mesmerizingly, she reveals the shimmering worlds she created in those classrooms,
inside a revolution that was an apogee of kitsch and cruelty. Here, people think for themselves because James and Fitzgerald and Nabokov sing out against authoritarianism and repression. You will be taken inside a culture, and on a journey, that you will never forget.?
?Jacki Lyden, National Public Radio, author of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba
?A memoir about teaching Western literature in revolutionary Iran, with profound and fascinating insights into both. A masterpiece.?
?Bernard Lewis, author of The Crisis of Islam?
?[A] vividly braided memoir...anguished and glorious.?
?Cynthia Ozick, The New Republic
?Stunning...a literary life raft on Iran?s fundamentalist sea...All readers should read it.?
?Margaret Atwood
?Remarkable...an eloquent brief on the transformative power of fiction.?
?The New York Times
?Certain books by our most talented essayists...carry inside their covers the heat and struggle of a life?s central choice being made and the price being paid, while the writer tells us about other matters, and leaves behind a path of sadness and sparkling loss. Reading Lolita in Tehran is such a book.?
?Mona Simpson, The Atlantic Monthly
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