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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
A little Lit. 101, A little Iranian Culture, A little Wishing for Freedom,
By
This review is from: Reading Lolita In Tehran - A Memoir In Books (Paperback)
"Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale... Let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of the good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate... Every fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies."Azar Nafisi's book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, writes of her time as a professor in Iran up to 1995. It is through the eyes of a woman who has seen and lived the experience of much freedom in the United States and compares it to her homeland of Iran. But the telling of it is through the books she lectures about and the students' discussions of these books. A good Muslim man will not touch, even in handshake, the hand of a woman; "My experiences, especially my teaching experiences, in Iran have been framed by the feel and touch of that aborted handshake, as much as by that first approach and the glow of our naïve, excited conversation." All of Jane Austen's books, The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary or Casablanca are hard to fathom in a country where "love was forbidden, banished from the public sphere. How could it be experienced if its expression was illegal?" "It banned ballet and dancing and told ballerinas they had a choice between acting or singing. Later women were banned from singing, because a woman's voice like her hair, was sexually provocative and should be kept hidden." Woven in with the book discussions is the story of the women in Nafisi's special invite reading group. A student suddenly disappears and when she finally comes back to the reading group she tells the others that she had been imprisoned, tortured and eventually released. The crime? Laughing in a private home's courtyard with a group of girls. Angry that the current regime has "even penetrated their hearts and minds, insinuating itself into our homes, spying on us in our bedrooms, that it had come to shape us against our own will;" "And it felt good to know where to place the blame, one of the few compensations of victimhood"- `and suffering is another bad habit.'" She is gently reprimanded by a friend, "Because the regime won't leave you alone, do you intend to conspire with it and give it complete control over your life?" In fact, Azar Nafisi realizes that "It is frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions. Yes, says her friend, to have no Islamic-republic to blame." So goes the life of these women who have a book club in a country where the books they read can suddenly be banned and they punished for owning what yesterday was legal to read. They are left to decide whether they should stay in their country or seek freedom and a new life.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tyrants, beware!,
By E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 100 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Reading Lolita In Tehran - A Memoir In Books (Paperback)
Reading Lolita in Tehran" (RLT) is a Persian variation on "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Both are about surviving cruel, arbitrary tyrants.
There was a brilliant essay on RLT in the July 19, 2004 "Washington Post" entitled "Sorry, Wrong Chador." At the time, Nafisi's book had not even been translated into Persian, but Iranians still had opinions about it: "The problem, several Iranians said in interviews, is that Nafisi left Tehran seven years ago. Her highly personal account of 18 years living under the mullahs is as absorbing a history as might be found of this place in that time. But it ends precisely at what most people here call the dawn of a new era in Iran, the 1997 landslide election of Mohammad Khatami as president." Some may believe it dated, but "Reading Lolita in Tehran," just like Solzhenitsyn's classic, is actually timeless. Nafisi's mullahs may be history, just as Stalin's labor camps are now history, but somewhere in the world people are still unjustly imprisoned. Somewhere in the world women are still treated as non-citizens. Iran itself is not yet a paradise for women. The Iranian Nobel peace prize winner, Shirin Ebadi has recently received death threats for her 'un-Islamic' behavior--she is the cofounder of the Tehran-based Center of Human Rights Defenders, which was banned by the Interior Ministry. Iranian women are still fighting for free access to public places such as universities and coffee shops. The police periodically campaign against 'un-Islamic' dress. As far as I know, it is still legal to marry a nine-year-old girl in Iran, a practice Nafisi fiercely condemns--and this brings us back to "Lolita" and why Nabokov's book was so popular with Nafisi's students. My own impression of "Lolita" was 'silly nymphet with heart-shaped sunglasses seduces helpless adult male'. Yukk! I had never actually read it or seen the movie. Nafisi points out that my synopsis was completely wrong. It should have read, 'powerful adult male kills young girl's mother and takes complete control of his stepdaughter, even to the point of renaming her (Lolita's real name was 'Dolores'.) He forces her to conform to his most intimate fantasies, and if he is in some way disappointed, he blames and punishes her. Humbert Humbert reminds Nafisi's students of various males who had abused them, including the mullahs who were then in power. One student was sent to prison because a male caught a glimpse of her neck and found it highly erotic. There are some very sad stories in this book about the abuse of women and the stunting of human relationships, all in the name of religion and power. But RLT also pays tribute to the vitality and teaching power of Western and Persian literature. I had never realized how gloriously subversive Jane Austin's novels were until I read Nafasi. Tyrants should never rest easy on their thrones if their subjects can read Austen, Nabokov, Henry James, or even Mark Twain. This book really opened my eyes as to why fiction should be read. It can be even more dangerous than books about making bombs.
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