Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

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Overview

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely–their stories intertwining with the novels they were reading by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, as fundamentalists seized hold of the universities and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the women in Nafisi’s living room spoke not only of the books they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments.

Azar Nafisi’s luminous masterwork gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny, and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

In 1995, Azar Nafisi resigned from the faculty of a Tehran University because of the repressive "morality guard" policies of the Iranian authorities. Soon thereafter, she invited seven of her best female students to attend a secret weekly seminar on Western literature. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, she offers a moving account of these clandestine classes and vivid portraits of the brave young women who attended them. A subtle, gifted writer, Nafisi describes the powerful effect that seemingly alien works like The Great Gatsby had on her reading group.

The New York Times

[The book] is a visceral and often harrowing portrait of the Islamic revolution in that country and its fallout on the day-to-day lives of Ms. Nafisi and her students. It is a thoughtful account of the novels they studied together and the unexpected parallels they drew between those books and their own experiences as women living under the unforgiving rule of the mullahs. And it is, finally, an eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction — on the refuge from ideology that art can offer to those living under tyranny, and art's affirmative and subversive faith in the voice of the individual. — Michiku Kakutani

More Reviews (5) Fewer Reviews

The Washington Post

The meaning of Nafisi's title at once becomes clear: How we read works of literature can depend as much on who we are and where we are as on the works themselves. Reading Lolita in Tehran in the 1990s was not the same as reading Lolita in Washington in 2003. The story of the nymphet Lolita and her guardian/rapist Humbert Humbert strikes different chords in different places, thus reminding us of the limitless power of literature — of art — to reveal and to transform, and of the limitless legitimate interpretations to which great literature lends itself. — Jonathan Yardley

USA Today

Reading Lolita in Tehran, "a memoir in books," is an inspiring account of an insatiable desire for intellectual freedom in Iran before, during and after the 1979 revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power and began a period of fervent anti-Americanism in the country. The eight years of the Iran-Iraq war also are vividly recounted. — Stephen J. Lyons

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. (On sale Apr. 1)Forecast: Women's book groups will adore Nafisi's imaginative work. Booksellers might suggest they read it along with some of the classics Nafisi examines, including Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Nafisi taught English literature at the University of Tehran from 1979 to 1981, when she was expelled for refusing to wear the veil, and later at the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai in Tehran. In 1997, she and her family left Iran for the United States. This riveting memoir details Nafisi's clandestine meetings with seven hand-picked young women, who met in her home during the two-year period before she left Iran to read and discuss classic Western novels like Lolita, The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice. The women, who at first were suspicious of one another and afraid to speak their minds, soon opened up and began to express their dreams and disappointments as they responded to the books they were reading. Their stories reflect the oppression of the Iranian regime but also the determination not to be crushed by it. Nafisi's lucid style keeps the reader glued to the page from start to finish and serves both as a testament to the human spirit that refuses to be imprisoned and to the liberating power of literature. Highly recommended for all libraries. [For an interview with Nafisi, see p. 100.]-Ron Ratliff, Kansas State Univ., Manhattan Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

So you want a revolution? If your foe is an ayatollah, try reading Jane Austen. So exiled writer and scholar Nafisi (English/Johns Hopkins Univ.) instructs in this sparkling memoir of life in post-revolutionary Iran. A modest dissident during the shah’s regime, a member of a Marxist study group like so many other Iranian students abroad ("I never fully integrated into the movement. . . . I never gave up the habit of reading and loving ‘counterrevolutionary’ writers"), Nafisi taught literature at the University of Tehran after the revolution. After running afoul of the mullahs for having dared teach such "immoral" novels as The Great Gatsby and such "anti-Islamic" writers as Austen, she organized a literary study group that met in her home. Fittingly, the first work her group, made up of seven young women, turned to was The Thousand and One Nights, narrated by that great revolutionary Scheherazade. "When my students came into that room," Nafisi writes, "they took off more than their scarves and robes. . . . Our world in that living room became our sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of the black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below." Tracing her students’ discussions and journeys of self-discovery while revisiting scenes from her "decadent" youth, Nafisi puts a fine spin on works that Western students so often complain about having to read--The Golden Bowl, Mansfield Park, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway. And, without once sinking into sentimentality or making overly large claims for the relative might of the pen over the sword, Nafisi celebrates the power of literature to nourish free thought in climes inhospitable to it; as she remarks, Vladimir Nabokov’snovel Lolita may not have been a direct "critique of the Islamic Republic, but it went against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives," while enjoying the pages of Pride and Prejudice with friends served as a powerful reminder that "our society was far more advanced than its new rulers." A spirited tribute both to the classics of world literature and to resistance against oppression.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780812971064
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 12/30/2003
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 62,579
Product dimensions: 5.10 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. She won a fellowship from Oxford and taught English literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University and Allameh Tabatabai University in Iran. She was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil and left Iran for America in 1997. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New Republic, and is the author of Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.

Biography

There are certain works of western literature that most students in the United States will probably read at some point in their college careers. Pride and Prejudice. The Great Gatsby. Lolita. On American shores, these books are generally considered classics -- must-reads for anyone with the slightest interest in literature. Of course, this is most assuredly not the case in the Tehran, Iran. Since the 1979 revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power and began the anti-Americanism that caused Western culture to essentially be purged from Iran, such titles became all but forbidden. To teach them in the classroom -- especially one containing female students -- would be a genuine and punishable act of rebellion.

When Azar Nafisi was teaching literature at the University of Tehran, her syllabus was the least of her problems. Imagine living in a society in which it is an offense for a woman to show so much as a strand of hair in public. Now imagine how a woman who was encouraged by her father to explore her own personal history and engage in the art of story telling as a young girl might react to such a society. Nafisi was an independent, free-thinking woman living under a repressive regime. She was also an avowed fan of western culture: the films of the Marx Brothers, the plays of Shakespeare, the music of the Beatles, the literature of Jane Austen, Henry Miller, and Vladimir Nabokov. No longer able to adhere to the stringent rules of Islamic society, Nafisi refused to wear her veil in class and was summarily expelled from the University in 1981.

However, Nafisi's dismissal did not put an end to her teaching career. She returned to her profession in 1987, but had not lost her taste for testing the limits of the system. She would ultimately resign from her post for good in 1995, seeking a more creative means to educate. Nafisi secretively gathered a group of seven women, all former students of hers, to read and discuss those very novels that were deemed inappropriate for women in Iran.

For two years, Nafisi and her small class gathered together at her home on Thursday mornings where they would study Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller, and, of course, Lolita. And as the women explored and analyzed these classics, discussing the books in an open forum with a teacher who encouraged the women to express themselves freely, they also opened up about their own lives. Together they talked about their dreams, their failures, and the changes for which they wished.

Azar Nafisi's literary experiment would become the subject of her breakthrough debut memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. The book poetically recounts both those liberating Thursday mornings and the Ayatollah's rise to power fifteen years earlier.

Reading Lolita in Tehran has deservedly become something of an instant classic. Due to its lyricism, and the courage at the core of the story, the book has won Nafisi nearly universal praise. The New York Times called it "an eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction -- on the refuge from ideology that art can offer to those living under tyranny, and art's affirmative and subversive faith in the voice of the individual."

Since 1997, Nafisi has lived in the United States, where she continues to teach. She also continues to write, having op-ed pieces and articles published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, and The New Republic. Meanwhile, Reading Lolita in Tehran continues to inspire readers, grateful that Azar Nafisi had the courage to step out from behind the veil.

Good To Know

In her interview with Barnes & Noble.com, Nafisi talked about some of her favorite memories, interests, and the ways she likes to unwind:

"When I was barely five, every Friday (Iranian weekend) morning my father would take me for a long walk, near the suburbs of Tehran. Our destination was a small fountain. He had bought me a special cup, which I would fill once we reached there. All through our walk he regaled me with stories. We also made up stories, sometimes about our own lives, and sometimes about fantastic creatures and worlds. This ritual, which lasted for a few years, still shines in my memory. Every once in a while in my imagination I search for that very small fountain that had seemed to me so enormous and bountiful."

"My father's especial way of relating to us influenced the relation between my brother and me. My best memories of my brother are when we took our books to fancy parties my parents made us go to and the way we whispered and created a magical edge to the pattern of everyday reality. We carved a private intimate world of our own to which no one could enter without knowing our secret magic word. It remained with me when I had my own children. My best hours in Iran were spent with my husband and two children, teasing and making up stories. We spent long hours during the war watching films by the Marx Brothers and laughing until we cried."

"When I was in college I, like so many other students, became involved in the student protest movements, but somehow I could never rid myself of certain 'bourgeois' habits: reading works by those authors called 'bourgeois,' or seeing 'bourgeois' films were among some of my unforgivable sins."

"The first time I visited Washington, D.C., was during one of the antiwar demonstrations. At one point a painter friend of mine and I stole our way toward the National Gallery. There was tear gas in the streets and the museum was to be closed early. My friend and I were playing hide-and-seek, trying to evade the guards and prolong our stay, when suddenly I came across Dali's The Last Supper. There I stood, transfixed until I was forced out of the museum.

"Years later, when I made another pilgrimage to the National Gallery, I found many other paintings that I admired more than The Last Supper, but I almost always make a point of paying a special visit to that particular painting. Dali is not my favorite painter, but that day, and that moment, I realized with a shock of the existence of a sense of beauty and dignity that went beyond any transient concern, especially a political one. Through what other means can we reaffirm mankind's highest sense of individual integrity and strength, overcoming not just life's obstacles but death's absolute dominion?"

"Whenever I am really nervous and sometimes unhappy, I take out some scoops of coffee ice cream, mix it with coffee and nuts (either walnuts or almonds) and immerse myself in the soothing cool of the coffee ice cream going down my throat. When an idea comes to me for writing, this nervousness reaches its heights and along with it my consumption of ice cream, coffee, and nuts."

"After a particularly hard day, I like to watch Seinfeld, Law and Order, (not Criminal Intent) and mystery films, especially the British mysteries. The most reliable news show I watch is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart! I also love the classic movies on Turner Classic Movies."

"I love paintings. Sometimes I steal an hour or so and go to the Phillips Collection, which is close to my work, and watch and watch. I like to watch only a few paintings at a time and focus on them for a while and then move on to others. Every once in a while I go to the National Gallery in D.C. to pay homage to the one Da Vinci they have. In order to remember a painting or a view, I look at it for a long time, then close my eyes and try to reconstruct the image in my mind, then open my eyes and look again."

"I love going to theater, especially with my family, and three friends with whom we share a great deal. I also love reading poetry and sometimes Shakespeare aloud when I am alone. I hold the book in my hands and move around the house, reading and reading, thinking, If this is not a miracle I don't know what is."

1. Hometown:
  
  Potomac, Maryland
1. Education:
  
  M.A., Ph.D., Oklahoma University, 1979

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream. I chose seven of my best and most committed students and invited them to come to my home every Thursday morning to discuss literature. They were all women-to teach a mixed class in the privacy of my home was too risky, even if we were discussing harmless works of fiction. One persistent male student, although barred from our class, insisted on his rights. So he, Nima, read the assigned material, and on special days he would come to my house to talk about the books we were reading.

I often teasingly reminded my students of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and asked, Which one of you will finally betray me? For I am a pessimist by nature and I was sure at least one would turn against me. Nassrin once responded mischievously, You yourself told us that in the final analysis we are our own betrayers, playing Judas to our own Christ. Manna pointed out that I was no Miss Brodie, and they, well, they were what they were. She reminded me of a warning I was fond of repeating: do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth. Yet I suppose that if I were to go against my own recommendation and choose a work of fiction that would most resonate with our lives in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it would not be The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or even 1984 but perhaps Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading or better yet, Lolita.

A couple of years after we had begun our Thursday-morning seminars, on the last night I was in Tehran, a few friends and students came to say good-bye and to help me pack. When we had deprived the house of all its items, when the objects had vanished and the colors had faded into eight gray suitcases, like errant genies evaporating into their bottles, my students and I stood against the bare white wall of the dining room and took two photographs.

I have the two photographs in front of me now. In the first there are seven women, standing against a white wall. They are, according to the law of the land, dressed in black robes and head scarves, covered except for the oval of their faces and their hands. In the second photograph the same group, in the same position, stands against the same wall. Only they have taken off their coverings. Splashes of color separate one from the next. Each has become distinct through the color and style of her clothes, the color and the length of her hair; not even the two who are still wearing their head scarves look the same.

The one to the far right in the second photograph is our poet, Manna, in a white T-shirt and jeans. She made poetry out of things most people cast aside. The photograph does not reflect the peculiar opacity of Manna's dark eyes, a testament to her withdrawn and private nature.

Next to Manna is Mahshid, whose long black scarf clashes with her delicate features and retreating smile. Mahshid was good at many things, but she had a certain daintiness about her and we took to calling her "my lady." Nassrin used to say that more than defining Mahshid, we had managed to add another dimension to the word lady. Mahshid is very sensitive. She's like porcelain, Yassi once told me, easy to crack. That's why she appears fragile to those who don't know her too well; but woe to whoever offends her. As for me, Yassi continued good-naturedly, I'm like good old plastic; I won't crack no matter what you do with me.

Yassi was the youngest in our group. She is the one in yellow, bending forward and bursting with laughter. We used to teasingly call her our comedian. Yassi was shy by nature, but certain things excited her and made her lose her inhibitions. She had a tone of voice that gently mocked and questioned not just others but herself as well.

I am the one in brown, standing next to Yassi, with one arm around her shoulders. Directly behind me stands Azin, my tallest student, with her long blond hair and a pink T-shirt. She is laughing like the rest of us. Azin's smiles never looked like smiles; they appeared more like preludes to an irrepressible and nervous hilarity. She beamed in that peculiar fashion even when she was describing her latest trouble with her husband. Always outrageous and outspoken, Azin relished the shock value of her actions and comments, and often clashed with Mahshid and Manna. We nicknamed her the wild one.

On my other side is Mitra, who was perhaps the calmest among us. Like the pastel colors of her paintings, she seemed to recede and fade into a paler register. Her beauty was saved from predictability by a pair of miraculous dimples, which she could and did use to manipulate many an unsuspecting victim into bending to her will.

Sanaz, who, pressured by family and society, vacillated between her desire for independence and her need for approval, is holding on to Mitra's arm. We are all laughing. And Nima, Manna's husband and my one true literary critic-if only he had had the perseverance to finish the brilliant essays he started to write-is our invisible partner, the photographer.

There was one more: Nassrin. She is not in the photographs-she didn't make it to the end. Yet my tale would be incomplete without those who could not or did not remain with us. Their absences persist, like an acute pain that seems to have no physical source. This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.

When I see Nassrin in my mind's eye, she's slightly out of focus, blurred, somehow distant. I've combed through the photographs my students took with me over the years and Nassrin is in many of them, but always hidden behind something-a person, a tree. In one, I am standing with eight of my students in the small garden facing our faculty building, the scene of so many farewell photographs over the years. In the background stands a sheltering willow tree. We are laughing, and in one corner, from behind the tallest student, Nassrin peers out, like an imp intruding roguishly on a scene it was not invited to. In another I can barely make out her face in the small V space behind two other girls' shoulders. In this one she looks absentminded; she is frowning, as if unaware that she is being photographed.

How can I describe Nassrin? I once called her the Cheshire cat, appearing and disappearing at unexpected turns in my academic life. The truth is I can't describe her: she was her own definition. One can only say that Nassrin was Nassrin.

For nearly two years, almost every Thursday morning, rain or shine, they came to my house, and almost every time, I could not get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color. When my students came into that room, they took off more than their scarves and robes. Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self. Our world in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below.

The theme of the class was the relation between fiction and reality. We read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our own lady of fiction, Scheherazade, from A Thousand and One Nights, along with Western classics-Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Daisy Miller, The Dean's December and, yes, Lolita. As I write the title of each book, memories whirl in with the wind to disturb the quiet of this fall day in another room in another country.

Here and now in that other world that cropped up so many times in our discussions, I sit and reimagine myself and my students, my girls as I came to call them, reading Lolita in a deceptively sunny room in Tehran. But to steal the words from Humbert, the poet/criminal of Lolita, I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won't really exist if you don't. Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn't dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary instances of life, listening to music, falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran. And then imagine us again with all this confiscated, driven underground, taken away from us.

If I write about Nabokov today, it is to celebrate our reading of Nabokov in Tehran, against all odds. Of all his novels I choose the one I taught last, and the one that is connected to so many memories. It is of Lolita that I want to write, but right now there is no way I can write about that novel without also writing about Tehran. This, then, is the story of Lolita in Tehran, how Lolita gave a different color to Tehran and how Tehran helped redefine Nabokov's novel, turning it into this Lolita, our Lolita.

And so it happened that one Thursday in early September we gathered in my living room for our first meeting. Here they come, one more time. First I hear the bell, a pause, and the closing of the street door. Then I hear footsteps coming up the winding staircase and past my mother's apartment. As I move towards the front door, I register a piece of sky through the side window. Each girl, as soon as she reaches the door, takes off her robe and scarf, sometimes shaking her head from side to side. She pauses before entering the room. Only there is no room, just the teasing void of memory.

More than any other place in our home, the living room was symbolic of my nomadic and borrowed life. Vagrant pieces of furniture from different times and places were thrown together, partly out of financial necessity, and partly because of my eclectic taste. Oddly, these incongruous ingredients created a symmetry that the other, more deliberately furnished rooms in the apartment lacked.

My mother would go crazy each time she saw the paintings leaning against the wall and the vases of flowers on the floor and the curtainless windows, which I refused to dress until I was finally reminded that this was an Islamic country and windows needed to be dressed. I don't know if you really belong to me, she would lament. Didn't I raise you to be orderly and organized? Her tone was serious, but she had repeated the same complaint for so many years that by now it was an almost tender ritual. Azi-that was my nickname-Azi, she would say, you are a grown-up lady now; act like one. Yet there was something in her tone that kept me young and fragile and obstinate, and still, when in memory I hear her voice, I know I never lived up to her expectations. I never did become the lady she tried to will me into being.

That room, which I never paid much attention to at that time, has gained a different status in my mind's eye now that it has become the precious object of memory. It was a spacious room, sparsely furnished and decorated. At one corner was the fireplace, a fanciful creation of my husband, Bijan. There was a love seat against one wall, over which I had thrown a lace cover, my mother's gift from long ago. A pale peach couch faced the window, accompanied by two matching chairs and a big square glass-topped iron table.

My place was always in the chair with its back to the window, which opened onto a wide cul-de-sac called Azar. Opposite the window was the former American Hospital, once small and exclusive, now a noisy, overcrowded medical facility for wounded and disabled veterans of the war. On "weekends"-Thursdays and Fridays in Iran- the small street was crowded with hospital visitors who came as if for a picnic, with sandwiches and children. The neighbor's front yard, his pride and joy, was the main victim of their assaults, especially in summer, when they helped themselves to his beloved roses. We could hear the sound of children shouting, crying and laughing, and, mingled in, their mothers' voices, also shouting, calling out their children's names and threatening them with punishments. Sometimes a child or two would ring our doorbell and run away, repeating their perilous exercise at intervals.

From our second-story apartment-my mother occupied the first floor, and my brother's apartment, on the third floor, was often empty, since he had left for England-we could see the upper branches of a generous tree and, in the distance, over the buildings, the Elburz Mountains. The street, the hospital and its visitors were censored out of sight. We felt their presence only through the disembodied noises emanating from below.

I could not see my favorite mountains from where I sat, but opposite my chair, on the far wall of the dining room, was an antique oval mirror, a gift from my father, and in its reflection, I could see the mountains capped with snow, even in summer, and watch the trees change color. That censored view intensified my impression that the noise came not from the street below but from some far-off place, a place whose persistent hum was our only link to the world we refused, for those few hours, to acknowledge.

That room, for all of us, became a place of transgression. What a wonderland it was! Sitting around the large coffee table covered with bouquets of flowers, we moved in and out of the novels we read. Looking back, I am amazed at how much we learned without even noticing it. We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.

Foreward

1. On her ﬁrst day teaching at the University of Tehran, Azar Naﬁsi began class with some questions: “What should ﬁction accomplish? Why should anyone read at all?” What are your answers to these questions? How does ﬁction force us to question what we often take for granted?

2. Yassi adores playing with words, particularly with Nabokov’s fanciful linguistic creation upsilamba (18). What does the word upsilamba mean to you?

3. In what ways had Ayatollah Khomeini “turned himself into a myth” for the people of Iran (246)? Discuss the recurrent theme of complicity in the book: the idea that the Ayatollah, the stern philosopher-king who limited freedoms and terrorized the innocent, “did to us what we allowed him to do” (28). To what extent are the supporters of a revolution responsible for its unintended results?

4. Compare attitudes toward the veil held by men, women and the government in the Islamic Republic of Iran. How was Naﬁsi’s grandmother’s choice to wear the chador marred by the political signiﬁcance it had gained (192)? Also, describe Mahshid’s conﬂicted feelings as a Muslim who already observed the veil but who nevertheless objected to its political enforcement.

5. In discussing the frame story of the murderous king in A Thousand and One Nights, Naﬁsi mentions three types of women who fell victim to his unreasonable rule (19). What is the relevance of this story for the women in Naﬁsi’s private class?

6. Explain what Naﬁsi means when she calls herself and her beliefsincreasingly “irrelevant” in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Compare her way of dealing with this irrelevance to the self-imposed exile of the man she calls her “magician.” What can people who “lose their place in the world” do to survive, both physically and creatively?

7. During the Gatsby trial, Zarrin charges Mr. Nyazi with the inability to “distinguish ﬁction from reality” (128). How does Mr. Nyazi’s conﬂation of the ﬁctional and the real compare to the actions of the blind censor, who retains the authority to suppress performances when he cannot even see? Discuss the role of censorship in both authoritarian and democratic governments. Can you think of instances in the United States when art was censored for its “dangerous” impact upon society?

8. Naﬁsi writes: “It was not until I had reached home that I realized the true meaning of exile” (145). How do her conceptions of home conﬂict with those of her husband, Bijan, who is reluctant to leave Tehran? Also, compare Mahshid’s feeling that she “owes” something to Tehran to Mitra’s and Nassrin’s desires for freedom and escape. Discuss how the changing and often discordant inﬂuences of memory, family, safety, freedom, opportunity and duty deﬁne our sense of home and belonging.

9. Fanatics like Mr. Ghomi, Mr. Nyazi and Mr. Bahri consistently surprised Naﬁsi by displaying absolute hatred for Western literature—a reaction she describes as a “venom uncalled for in relation to works of ﬁction” (195). What are their motivations? Do you, like Naﬁsi, think that people like Mr. Ghomi attack because they are afraid of what they don’t understand? Why is ambiguity such a dangerous weapon to them?

10. The conﬁscation of one’s life by another is the root of Humbert’s sin in Lolita. Discuss how Khomeini likewise acted as a “solipsizer,” robbing individuals of their identities to promote total allegiance. What does Naﬁsi mean when she says that Sanaz, Nassrin, Azin and the rest of her girls are part of a “generation with no past” (76)?

11. Naﬁsi teaches that the novel is a sensual experience of another world, that it appeals to the reader’s capacity for compassion. Do you agree that “empathy is at the heart of the novel”? How has this book affected your understanding of the impact of the novel?

12. Naﬁsi’s account of life in the Islamic Republic transcends national and geographical boundaries. Discuss how the experience of censorship, fundamentalism and human rights, as well as the enjoyment of works of imagination and the desire for individual freedoms, may be similar in totalitarian societies and in democracies such as ours.

Reading Group Guide

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, fromthe 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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Anonymous

Posted May 27, 2008

Insightful and wonderfully-written

People have complained about this book for numerous reasons, for everything from Nafisi being a propagandist for the Bush administration to it being too 'boring' for focusing on literary criticism in detail when it should just be a narrative memoir. First of all, this book is a book written by a woman who is passionate about books - in essence, a book about books. Nafisi was a literary professor at a university in Tehran before her expulsion during the ascent of the regime/revolution. Her sobering, first-hand experiences living during the Regime in Iran, coupled with her unquenchable penchant for literature, drove her to write this memoir, and the result is a triumphant weaving of the two - current events in the Middle East and timeless Western literature playing off each other as described by an Iranian woman passionate about freedom, women's rights and¿Western literature. This is hardly propaganda. What it is is a memoir about literature and the powerful joy it brings, even in tumultuous times in the Middle East during bombing raids and wearing the veil mandatorily, and a consequent first-hand look into the lifestyle in such a predicament by an author who, while candid and completely honest in her condemnation of the totalitarian regime she was subjected to, does not once act bitter or caustic about her ordeals, or write about her impressions in a way that is at all manipulative or self-righteous. Any 'human' emotions or a opinions Nafisi does express simply reflect the fact that this is, after all, a memoir - a personal account of things that could be written in otherwise impersonal works (i.e. current events books and literary anthologies). 'Reading Lolita In Tehran' gives us an insight into both famous books and modern politics/history, but through the less-formal account of a woman who, although isn't treating it formally, knows an awful darn lot about both. And she happens to be a really interesting person and a really good writer.

5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
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Viejo

Posted March 16, 2009

more from this reviewer

Educational Treasure for Young Women

This book is beautifully written in the intimacy of Azar Nafisi's literary book club. The club is composed by seven Muslim women that just like Nafisi, open their heart and invite the reader to take a step into their life in the Islamic world. Each week they come into Nafisi's house unveiling their faces and freeing themselves from the restrictions of their society by reading and discussing tabooed subjects. In a sense, they find an escape to their real life problems in the fictitious plots of literary classics. It invites women of all ages around the world, to seek comfort for their own problems by submerging themselves in epic novels while standing up for their rights. This memoir is an example of how literature can help us heal the wound of our past and how important it is to defend freedom of expression.

As a high school student, I consider this novel to be a great educational treasure. Not only does it create conscience on the empowerment of women and invites us to believe in gender equality, but it also teaches us about the different cultures and political issues in today's world. At the very same time it is also a book promoting Western literature that introduces us to the stories of each woman by relating it to the plot of classical novels such as The Great Gatsby, Pride & Prejudice and Lolita. As one reads the novel, you become acquainted with each member of the group and have access to their most intimate but important feelings and opinions. I consider that this novel can change the perspective some men have about women, and encourage them to see them as equal.

Nafisi is a woman to be admired. This book comes from her true life personal experiences in the battle towards spreading her love for knowledge in a restricted world. Reading Lolita in Tehran will touch the emotions of any reader, it will make us cry, laugh, but above all mostly think. For anyone interested in Literature, Politics, Anthropology or that has ever been a book club member it is a must read.

In my personal experience, the book opened my eyes towards life for women in the Islamic world. Although sometimes I found their experiences to have been heart breaking and intolerable, they also made me respect them much more than I did. I got to know the woman behind the Hijaab (Muslim veil), her culture and her life.

The only recommendation I would give off when it comes to Reading Lolita in Tehran is that if you have read The Great Gatsby, Pride & Prejudice and Lolita it will be easier for you to understand the full context of the plot. The author constantly related the plots of these books to the experiences of the book club members. However, it is not something necessary. I had not read any of these books except for Pride and Prejudice and really enjoyed the book. Except that at times I wished I knew Lolita by heart to feel as if I understood each and every detail of the book.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted June 15, 2004

Fails to Meet the Promise

The author has a fascinating story to tell--that of life during the Islarmic Revolution in Iran. The problem is that the editor allowed the author to spend an inordinate amount of time discussing her favorite fiction books and authors. The interesting non-fiction aspects of her life were relegated to second place status in the book. I found this disappointing book to be a slow and boring read.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Foxdaughter2

Posted February 11, 2011

Think Twice Before You Buy

I guess this would be a pretty good book, if were incredibly politically aware, especially of the entire history of the Middle East, since the 1970's. Also if you don't mind frequent, sudden, confusing switches between time periods. The authorial voice is kind of confusing, because it changes from all-knowing to know-nothing, with no warning. Finally, the sample of this book is misleading, because it starts like it is about a book club of Middle Eastern women, and is really about only the author. I was very disappointed when I discovered this last fact. So be warned!

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted August 22, 2009

Every woman - and man - should get into this one.

Nafisi got me right into the culture and minds and hearts of Iran and the women who live there. For the first time I have true understanding and empathy for their lives. You need to delve deeply to get there, and we owe it to the women all over to the world to do just that. Give it a few chapters and you'll be engrossed!

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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csi_speedchick

Posted May 12, 2010

I Also Recommend:

Intriguing, but easily put down...

I recommend this book for advanced readers who are interested in Iranian government during the late 1970s and early 1990s. The beginning is slightly misleading because it talks about a woman's life in Tehran, but the majority of the book talks about the revolution and the war.
I initially picked up this book because of the title: Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books. Reading is really an outlet for me and a book about books seemed like a new and fantastic option. As I scanned the first few pages I was intrigued because it began by explaining that a university teacher had been expelled for refusing to comply with wardrobe requirements and that she had started a book club that met on Thursdays to discuss none other than literature itself. The group, consisting of female members of the author's university classes, meets to read and confabulate two significant pieces of literature and two authors and their works.
The novel is set in four parts: Lolita, Gatsby, James, and Austen. The first section, Lolita, introduces the members of the group: Nassrin, Yassi, Azin, Mahshid, Manna, Sanaz, and Mitra; and their personalities. The author, Azar Nafisi, is the narrator and shares the story from her point of view while intelligently including the way she views others, their views, and the literature. When we move into the second section, Gatsby, Nafisi explains the Islamic Revolution and its impact on the universities. Interestingly, two members of one of her university classes have opposing views on The Great Gatsby and it's morality so the class puts the book on "trial." One male, Mr. Nyazi, doesn't want the class to study the novel because he believes that F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, is encouraging adultery and theft. Nyazi is elected to be the prosecutor. Zarrin, a female acting as Nafisi's lawyer, is in favor of studying the book because while it is immoral to the law with its adultery and theft, it still possesses some moral value. She states in her opposition to Mr. Nyazi's opening statement that a book can be called moral "when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in."
The third section, James, discusses each character's ability to influence others, such as leaders during the revolution influenced others' thoughts and feelings. The Revolution starts and seeps into the universities causing classes to be cancelled, people to be killed, and restlessness among the students. A war with Iraq is waged and Nafisi finds herself disappearing from the world just as the Iranian government wants her to. They steal her identity by forcing her to wear the veil and to conceal her entire body with severe consequences if she refuses. Ayatollah Khomeini: an extreme leader who viewed the war as a blessing; dies, but, as observed by Nafisi's daughter Negar, is still alive theoretically because Iranian women continue to wear the veil.
The fourth and final section, Austen, uses Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to reconnect Nafisi's Thursday classes and their purpose. We learn more about the lives of the women in the class. And we learn that Nafisi finally musters up the courage to leave Tehran for good and travel once again to America. She concludes that living in Tehran is like having sensual relations with a man you despise: "...you make your mind blank- you pretend to be somewhere else, you forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here."

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Goober98

Posted May 6, 2010

Terrible

I bought this book because it was selected for my book club. I couldn't finish this book, and neither could anyone else in my book club. We all thought it was unorganized and disjointed. I am shocked that so many people have rated this book so highly.

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Baomei

Posted May 5, 2010

Reverberating

A revelation of a revolution that promised a country the keys to heaven but gave its people the evils of hell instead. Nafisi tells her story eloquently on how she survived the upheavals of the revolution. Using her imaginative mind for fiction and her passion for literature, she brought a degree of comfort to the hearts of her students in the face of tyranny. Reading this book was a heartfelt experience of compassion and new found empathy for victims of an oppressive government.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted August 9, 2008

Ridiculous.

When reading the account of the Iranian lifestyle, one would assume Reading Lolita in Tehran would be a reliable recount for it's written by an Iranian. The truth of the matter is that Azar Nafisi is not, and was not, Iranian in culture. She grew up in Switzerland, thus was tainted by a Western view point. We are reading the experience of a woman who shares our ideals and morals, not of a woman who grew up on Islam. The book is plainly biased, only giving us the story of the revolution, an obviously bloody event for any nation, and portraying all Iranian women with the author's opinion. We don't get any insight to the average woman: The woman who fought for the veils and Islam enforcement. If you're going to read this book, read it with the knowledge of the Western bias. Do not read it for the insight on Iranian culture. It's account is no more reliable than if Bush himself came back from Iran to tell us about its culture. Apart from that, the book itself is pretty terrible. The narrator 'and author' is intolerable. She leeches off the wisdom of others while claiming to be an intellectual. She has no independent thought and shares the reckless piety of those she so hates. The book's delivery, the constant summarization of various novels, is possibly more boring than the story itself. Nafisi's analyses of the books will taint the actual books, which are legitimately well written, respectable pieces of literature. Her analyses are specific to a totalitarian government and supported by ridiculously vague assertions. Do not waste your money on this book. If you manage to finish it by some grace of God 'or Allah', you will get little to nothing out of it, and it'd surely ruin the quoted novels for you. It is impossible to relate to and its characters are completely unrealistic in their lack of flaws.

1 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted July 24, 2008

I have a policy of always finishing what I start but......

I can usually push myself to finish whatever book I start reading. I don't think I have ever given up on one but this may be my first. I just took this book with me on a 5 day trip and normally would have finished but I ended up reading about 20 pages. I feel like another reviewer, if I wanted to read a critique of Lolita and other books mentioned in this book I would have read the Cliff Notes. I was expecting more of what life had been like while the reading group was happening. I am disappointed and ready to move on.

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted April 11, 2004

Beautifully Written, Thought Provoking

I found this book beautifully written and lyrical. Given our current times, it was incredibly thought provoking. Dr. Nafsi sheds light on issues that many Westerners cannot comprehend. As a lover of literature (Nabokov, James and Fitzgerald serve as a backdrop for different chapters), I found this book incredibly creative and moving.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted January 30, 2004

Brilliant, Insightful Memoir

One of the most brilliant studies of another culture I've ever read. Absolutely captivating account of how powerful words and books are and how (this is only implied, not at all discussed) we Americans take our liberties for granted. Amazing for its lucid, passionate writing and the breadth of Iranian culture it captures. My other favorite memoir of 2003 was 'I Sleep At Red Lights: a True Story of Life After Triplets,' by Bruce Stockler, a warm, funny, revealing look at what it means to be a man and the joys of fatherhood.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted March 6, 2003

Fabulous and Inspiring

This is a very insightful book that inspires mindfulness. I recommend it to every westerner to read and understand their own potential and that of a people who are rarely heard from. The people whose talents, passions, and ambitions are frustrated and thwarted under the veil of Islamic oppression.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted April 22, 2012

Eye opening

Poetic and real and haunting. I have greater understanding and empathy for the oppressed women in this country. I also have a renewed love affair with the classics. I could not put it down. Page turner that makes one think.
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Anonymous

Posted March 4, 2012

Beautiful and haunting

I had to read this in college, but I'm so glad that it was required reading because I would never have picked it up otherwise.
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Lifeandtime

Posted June 29, 2011

Compelling read

I found this book a compelling and easy to read memoir of the war years in Tehran in which the oppression of women occurred. Previously, I was annoyed at women who chose to wear the veil and chador and felt sorry for those who lived in countries where it was necessary. After reading Dr. Nafisi's memoir of those turbulent and traumatic years in Iran, I gained a stronger understanding of the life women were forced to lead there. But more than that, Dr. Nafisi helped me see them as people whom I would be proud to know. I found this book to be gripping in a way that I was unable to put it down. The memoir is written around Dr. Nafisi's teaching of English literature in universities there and her comments on various English novels are used to help the reader understand certain universal truths. The book will definitely allow the reader to see Lolita in a new light.
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Angela2932ND

Posted April 28, 2010

Disjointed but Interesting

"Reading Lolita in Tehran" is Nafasi's historical account of her years in Tehran (1979 to 1980 and then in 1995). She uses themes from literature to provide an understanding of the losses and tragedies under a totalitarian regime. She is a professor of Western classics, first at the University of Tehran and then later in her own home with a small number of selected female students. Her book is chaotic and disjointed, but in her analysis of The Great Gatsby, she praises the ability of the novel to give the reader a sense of this time in America. She sees Fitzgerald as writing about the pursuit of dreams and their ultimate loss, but writing about them in such a way as to give this experience to the reader, rather than just "lecturing" about it. Perhaps I'm giving Nafasi too much credit, but throughout her novel, I wondered if she was attempting to accomplish the same thing: giving us the experience of the chaos of Iran during the initial revolution in 79-80, and then in the increasingly restrictive, bleak years in the early to mid 90s. In this memoir, she does not present a linear story line of her life in Tehran; this is a jumble of time periods, with clarity lost about the ideological issues being pitted against each other in the early years of the revolution. As a reader, I know that things will get progressively more controlling, with life becoming more and more unbearable in this increasingly repressive society; but I see the characters in Nafasi's memoir seeming to be oblivious to the coming perils to their freedom of thought, speech, choice, movement, and identity. Although there are many fascinating threads in this book, there is no coherent organizing theme to it. Most disturbing is the lack of sense of characters in the book. Nafasi teaches 7 young women in her living room, who come to her classes as great risk to themselves for violating the current rules of their society. But the identity of these women is thin and vague, as if even personality and spirit is diluted under the crushing veil of Iran's rule of women. Read this book for the interesting detail, but not for plot, comprehensive information, or involvement with the characters.
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davidc0469

Posted November 19, 2009

Reading Lolita was worth the read-

I just finished reading Lolita in Tehran and enjoyed the story. It basiscally is an interaction between the authors life teaching western literature in Iran (4 authors) and how the authors/their stories she taught in her classes came into play in their every day life. A select few of the authors students would meet every Thursday at her apartment (at their risk)wearing western clothes, letting their hair down etc in a strict Islamic country. It was difficult to keep up with all the students and their individual problems but if you focused you were eventually able to understand each student and their own individual situation. The story starts off very slow, a critique mostly on Nabakov but quickly picks up. What I found MOST interesting was the Nafisi's stories of just plain every day life and the perils of taking chances like she and her students did against revolutionary guards which could have lead to flogging,prison and even death. The ending is exciting and yet fullfilling for freedoms sake. 7 out of 10 for me. Just get through the beginning and your off and running.
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Anonymous

Posted May 18, 2009

AP World History Review: Reading Lolita in Tehran

The novel, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is simply an analysis of life in Iran before, during, and after the Islamic Revolution. Dr. Azar Nafisi, the author, uses the books she taught in her english literature classes to tell the story of the masses. Through the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Jane Austen, as well as the Great Gatsby, she expresses both the atrocities and oppressive behaviors imposed by the Islamist regime. Unlike many novels, this one starts in the author's own parlor. But, from this vantage point, Nafisi reminisces about the Iran of her youth. Being that her father had been in the government prior to the regime, she was unavoidably affected by the disaster that was post-Shah Iran. In fact her studies abroad were interrupted when her father was jailed. From here, the author reveals the anecdotal accounts of her classes, how at first the tempers flared high amongst her revolutionary and leftist students. Although she writes of long time span, the constant feature of her memoir was the clandestine class she formed.
After leaving her teaching career in the universities of Iran, Nafisi decided to round up some of her most dedicated and treasured students to come to her home on Thursday mornings and discuss various reading selections. At first, the reader only sees a motley crew of personalities. But, as the story progresses, the discussions reveals more intimate sides of all who participate. Interestingly enough, the reader follows these young women through their personal relations, fears, and joys. From this shift to private life can one find a problem with the novel. It seems as if Nafisi is unable to distinguish between the Islamist regimes and the religion, in itself. But, this may be due to the fact that she doesn't portray herself as religious. However it would have further enriched the memoir if she were able to relate the affect of the regime on non-radical, devout Muslims in Iran.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted May 3, 2009

I Also Recommend:

Ms. Afizi gives an insider's viewpoint in a world so unknown.

It was absorbing and a page turner.
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Insightful and wonderfully-written

Educational Treasure for Young Women

Fails to Meet the Promise

Think Twice Before You Buy

Every woman - and man - should get into this one.

Intriguing, but easily put down...

Terrible

Reverberating

Ridiculous.

I have a policy of always finishing what I start but......

Beautifully Written, Thought Provoking

Brilliant, Insightful Memoir

Fabulous and Inspiring

Eye opening

Beautiful and haunting

Compelling read

Disjointed but Interesting

Reading Lolita was worth the read-

AP World History Review: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Ms. Afizi gives an insider's viewpoint in a world so unknown.