Books and
Cooks West
September 2003
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
by Azar Nafisi
Dawn and Jared's Place
Saturday, September 6 at 5:30 PM
Vegetable rigatoni, salad, garlic bread, white wine, chocolate cake
Our rating: 3.9 cups of tea!
From
Amazon
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
