Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi

BY :Nakissa Sedaghat

After reading Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, I was surprised that it was placed in the Biography section of my local bookstore. While the book is partly an autobiographical account of Nafisi’s years in Iran as a professor of English literature, it often reads like an insightful and passionate literary critique of classics such as Nabokov’s Lolita. Reading this book will permit the reader to feel like they too are participating in Nafisi’s socratic teaching sessions with her devoted clan of students. It is enough to make you feel nostalgic for your long gone university days where you could take the time to really savor and appreciate the beauty of a masterpiece like Lolita. Nafisi does not only open a window into her personal life but also permits the reader to share in her unabated enthusiasm for reading and discussing authors such as Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and Austen. These literary discussions are not presented in a vacuum however. Nafisi cleverly weaves a link between the books she discusses and the life of her students, as well as how those old books are relevant to today’s Iran. It is no surprise that Nafisi, currently in the U.S., continues to teach literature to her Iranian students through email. (Although the recent crackdown on the Internet by Iranian authorities may have hindered access to her.)

Nafisi’s description of a real life class assignment that pitted the religious extremist male students of her class against the more liberal female is at the same time fascinating and frightening analysis of the post-revolutionary government’s censorship machine. The assignment was to put The Great Gatsby on trial for its alleged anti-Islamic values with Nafisi as the judge, the female students as the defense attorneys and the extremist religious students as the prosecutors. Nafisi sprinkles her book with other telling anecdotes such as the fact that the man in charge of the censorship of television programming in Iran was literally blind. Nafisi’s knack for telling a good story and for breathing life into the characters she modeled after the real life people she encountered in Iran succeeds in creating a deeper understanding of the every day trials and tribulations of living in Iran in the 1980s.

Probably the most interesting sections of the book are about the secret literature sessions Nafisi conducted at home for a handful of literary students after she was ousted from her post at the University of Tehran. Although she has changed names and other details to preserve the anonymity of her students, some of whom still live in Iran, the description of her circle of women is so on point that you feel you have already met these persons in real life. Far from evolving into caricatures, the portraits of Nafisis’s students represent widely different segments of the Iranian population, from the ex-political prisoner to the abused housewife, the demure young girl to the assertive feminist.

Another part of the appeal in Reading Lolita in Tehran is that it does not preach a political agenda and the author herself courageously hangs the dirty laundry of her past political aspirations and what they have turned into in reality. Instead of taking a stand for or against one party or the other, Reading Lolita in Tehran is simply a denunciation of totalitarian regimes, on a more universal level.

One note of advice: Brush up on your classics before picking up Nafisi’s book. As is true for all students, good preparation will make the class discussion all the more enjoyable.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is available on amazon.com.