Reading Lolita in Tehran

Random House

Reading Lolita in Tehran:  A Memoir in Books
Azar Nafisi
2003

The Summary
Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir by Azar Nafisi, an English professor who is attempting to teach Western literature to her students in revolutionary Iran during the 1970s and 1980s.

The Good
Azar Nafisi writes with incredible precision.  Her memoir is laden with a breadth and depth of knowledge that's both astonishing and impressive.  In her work, she tells everything as true as it can be of one's memory.  She bares all and tells all from her doubts, her hopes, her dreams to her discomfort and disillusionment as a woman living in revolutionary Iran.

I was amazed to see the impact of literature on the lives of these women that Nafisi describes, the women and students who shared her life during such a tumultuous time.  Additionally, I was intrigued to see the influence of Western literature on Nafisi and her students, how such words were received and dissected - and, in a word, loved.

I enjoyed reading Nafisi's memoir for the simple fact that she draws parallels between her reading and teaching and her life in Iran.  I enjoyed her candor, her intelligence, and her digressions.  She creates a voice that recreates her world, her life and thoughts at the time of events, and simultaneously offers a glimpse into literature that's truly unique.

The Bad
Reading Lolita in Tehran is an amazing book; however, it is highly literary.  Nafisi is a professor who studies literature, who has made reading and examining books a lifelong endeavor, thus much of who she is and what she does is wrapped up in teaching, dissecting, explaining and exploring the complicated nuances of literature.

I was lucky to have studied literature, lucky to have rightly understood her digressions on literature - like Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita, or F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, or Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice - otherwise I might have found her writing a bit inaccessible.

The Ugly
In opening Reading Lolita in Tehran, I was confronted with the harsh realities that many people faced during the Iranian Revolution and the war with Iraq that subsequently followed.  So many people were in danger simply because they were different, for wanting different things, for having different ideals that disagreed with the new Iranian regime.

Women especially faced terrifying circumstances, Nafisi describes:

"At the start of the twentieth century, the age of marriage in Iran - nine according to Sharia laws - was changed to thirteen and then later to eighteen.  My mother had chosen whom she wanted to marry and she had been one of the first 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.  [...]  I married, on the eve of the 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...was the family protection law, which guaranteed women rights at home and at work.  The age of marriage was lowered to nine - eight-and-a-half lunar years, we were told, adultery and prostitution were to be punished by stoning to death; and women under law were considered half the worth of men."

It's alarming.  One might even say sickening.