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- Author: Azar Nafisi
- Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE
- Published: November 2008
- ISBN-10: 0812979303
- ISBN-13: 9780812979305
- Format: Paperback
- Size: 5.75 X 1 X 8.25
- Weight: 0.9 lbs.
- Copyright: 2008
- Subject: LIT NON FICTION-MIDDLE EAST
Reading Lolita In Tehran: A Memoir In Books
By Azar Nafisi
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Product Description
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafasi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classivcs. Some of the women 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 sezied 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. Nafis's luminous book gives readers a rare gllimpse, from the inside, of women's lives in revolutionary Iran. An authentic tribute to liberty, and the liberating powers of literature. Suggested Reading. 380p.
Editorial 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's novel 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. Copyright Kirkus 2003 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved
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