Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
Review
“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
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.
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