Reading Lolita in Tehran Review

Nonfiction

Author: Azar Nafisi

356 pages

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

Rereadable!

            I was fortunate enough to read this book during a couple of really rainy days this summer. I became completely absorbed in Nafisi’s world. Couped up in my house, I began to imagine the vaguest sense of what Nafisi and her girls must have felt, imagining what it would be like to walk out my door and find my world altered beyond recognition. The idea that I could walk out my door everyday fully covered and become like a ghost or to rebel or to be perceived as rebelling and suffer abuse and injustice, taken away to an uncertain fate, was frightening.

To be clear, I haven’t read all the books that Nafisi taught, but the ones I had read became even more interesting and enlightening in the context of Tehran. The class debate Nafisi facilitated was especially eye-opening and oddly comparable to my limited experience as a teaching intern and student in similar debates.

Of course, I can’t wait to catch up to Nafisi’s reading list so that I may enjoy this book even more in rereads. For those of you that haven’t read any of the books discussed in this one and don’t have a background in literary analysis, I am still torn as to my recommendation. While the sections on Tehran’s history as experienced by Nafisi are indeed heartbreaking, powerful, and sublime, I can see that there will be those who don’t have the patience for the intellectual literary portions of the book. And while I understand that those sections might be difficult or tedious, I pity you, for this is a beautiful novel. I suppose, in the end, you’ll have to decide for yourself. I know I have.