Review of Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

By Bett

03-01-2008

Imagine a long deep conversation about your favorite literature. Imagine connecting with an intelligent passionate honest woman who has been through hell and has returned with a story to tell about surviving. Imagine listening to her describe her experiences with a totalitarian government in intimate detail that only a woman in Tehran could have had during the 80's and 90's. Imagine her growing up in a secular Tehran where woman were free to roam and dress as they pleased, and her experience a revolution which removed her freedoms. Imagine her living in a country where laughing in the street is a crime, where wearing finger nail polish is a transgression, where letting a strand of your hair fall out from under your headscarf will get you sent to prison where you will be raped. The reason the woman are raped when they get to prison is because only virgins can get into heaven.

Now, stop imagining and go read a book which will let you into the terror that is Iran. But the book isn't just about the revolution and its horrors. No this book also is about some of the best English literature seen through the eyes of those who need it. The citizens of Iran need to read about Humbert to gain perspective. In the world of Nabokov's Lolita, it's wrong to rape a 12 year old girl. Its wrong and Humbert knows its wrong. He tries to hide it and tries to disguise it to Lolita. But in Iran girls may be married off at the age of 9. They have no rights. They are property. There is no need to hide the sin of raping a 9 year old. Rape is the right of a husband. The scariest part for the author, Azar Nafisi, is before the revolution of 1980, women could only marry after their 18th birthday. She watched her country go back in time to the stone age.

Azar Nafisi, a young non-political woman from a family with a 700-year literary history, tries to teach her favorite books and authors including Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Jane Austin, Henry James. Her revolutionary students put The Great Gatsby on trial for being immoral. She keeps on teaching these books despite the attempts to censor her because she thinks that the students need to learn the great truths these books teach. But finally she is forced underground. She starts a class for her favorite eight girl students. She can only have females due to the dangers from the government. Men and women who aren't related can be arrested for meeting together. They discuss their favorite books in depth and in the context of their own lives.

Azar Nafisi employees no hyperbole; rather she is very subdued in her descriptions of the day to day hardships she and her students face. She shocks us with her continuing stories of women and men humiliated just doing normal human activities. We see that the Iranian government uses religion like Stalin used the ideals of communism. Both governments controlled their subjects out of a lust for power but use their thinly guised ideology as a control mechanism to distract their subjects from the real humanitarian offences being perpetrated upon them. The ideology is slightly different, but both try to control the minds of the citizens. Thought crimes become the main focus of attack.

It's amazing to those of us who grew up in the US or in other free countries to contemplate being told how to dress or walk. How much more so to imagine being told how to think. This memoir transports us to another world. A world not far from Orwell's vision: A boot stomping on a human's face for all of eternity.