Customer Reviews

Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Though I very much enjoyed "Reading Lolita In Tehran," Nafisi's new book, "Things I've Been Silent About" surpasses her first on nearly every level. She still tells the story of her live in conjunction with the books and stories that matter most to her, but "Things I've Been Silent About" is a far more personal tale. You feel that she is letting you into a life she was hesitant to speak of before, and the revelations that take place in the telling are heartbreaking and endearing.

Her struggle with her parents, her place between the two of them, is masterfully told. The hesitation she feels being there, as well as the favoritism she shows her father in many cases, closes any gaps one might have in relating to her story. Most children favor one family member over another at some point, and usually there is some sort of guilt that goes with that favoritism.

I'm rambling a bit, but I can't help it. This book moved me in ways her first book did not. In the end I hardly know what to say, except that you should read it.

I really enjoyed "Reading Lolita in Tehran," and was excited that she has written another book. I have been reading about the Middle Eastern cultures and couldn't wait to read Nafisi's book ... but I must confess, I am slightly disappointed with it. Oh, don't get me wrong as it is chock-full of politics, history and everything that could spark my interest in learning more about Iran. But I wasn't counting on this book to be of a love-hate relationship she has with her mother. That overshadowed everything I wanted to learn about Iran as that issue dragged on throughout the entire book ... and frankly, by the time I was finished with this book, I was really glad to be done with it. I love memoirs but this one really dragged.

It starts off strong ... with Nafisi describing her childhood in Tehran, visiting the chocolate, the toy and the book shops with her mother. It sounded like paradise; the descriptions were beautiful and lyrical that I could "see" in my imagination of what it must have been like for Nafisi as a young child. Then the battles with her mother intensified and carried on throughout the entire book (about 314 pages of it) and it got really tiresome. Her mother was emotionally abandoned by her father when she was a young child and though she lived in his house, her half-siblings were favored over her. She married young and when her husband died, she never got over it even after marrying Nafisi's father. She claimed to be a dancer though no one has ever seen her dance. The stories pile up and Nafisi spent years trying to get from under her mother's oppressive shadow. Nafisi went overseas to school, married young and finished school before divorcing her first husband. Headstrong, Nafisi grew into the woman that we first meet in her book, "Reading Lolita in Tehran."

Against the backdrop of the cultural revolution, Nafisi takes us on a journey peopled with Persian historical figures and myths, and shares with us a bit of her own history in relations to the political uprising of the time. Her father was the mayor of Tehran before he spent 4 years in jail for crimes he never committed. Her mother was in the Parliment while her father was in jail. Before her mother was in politics, she entertained all sorts of people in her house, offering coffee hour. It sounds exciting, fast-paced and Nafisi was always in the thick of things even as a child. Then the religious oppression arrived and Nafisi's family had to learn how to live in secret.

It really would have been an excellent book if she hadn't dwelled so much on her votile relationship with her mother. As it was, I personally got tired of reading armchair psychology and started skimming the book to get to the end. Like another reviewer said, mother-daughter relationships are complicated in the first place, but this memoir is one-sided. She attempted to explain her mother's side of things, but did a very poor job of it as I still couldn't figure her out at the end of the book (and made me very glad to have the mother I do have ...).

It is disappointing as I expected something more than a book lamenting her relationship with her mother. Yes, there were other things in the book, but that issue overshadowed everything else, just like she must have felt in her life with her mother overshadowing her everywhere she went.

6/1/09

Azar Nafisi is writing an earlier memoir about her dysfunctional family, especially her parents. Like Doris Lessing's "Alfred and Emily" and Julia Blackburn's "The Three of Us", this story is one of surviving one's parents. The author came from a mid-level political family and their is the backstory of Iranian history in the last century. The writing is crisp and riveting -- the abuse on numerous levels and her perception of her mother as an emotional controlling monster. After reading this book, the reader should turn to her tale about her later life : "Reading Lolita in Tehran".

Azar Nafisi, who will be best-known for the runaway success of her last book, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books has produced that marvel, a flawless, crisply-written and meaningful memoir that more than accomplishes her stated goal, that of telling the recounting "those fragile intersections -- the places where moments in an individual's private life and personality resonate with and reflect a larger, more universal story."

Nafisi is born into the Teheran of the 1940s and 50s, a world in which women such as her mother can receive an education and run for Parliament -- even as her father, a former mayor of Teheran, is imprisoned for unknown reasons and confined for years to a cell. But Nafisi, educated in Europe and the United States, where she joins the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s and becomes a vociferous opponent of the Shah's regime, returns to Iran after the revolution only to discovery the existence of a new kind of "black" totalitarianism -- clerical rule by Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors. It is against the backdrop of the dramatic events of these times -- coups, revolutions, civil war and war -- that Nafisi tells deeply personal stories of her life and those of her parents, two deeply incompatible people who damaged each other and, in their different ways, damaged their daughter.

From an early age, Nafisi learns to take refuge in stories and literature; first, the tales that her father tells her from Persian history and mythology (her favorite character is Ferdowsi's Radabeh, from the Shahnameh chronicles) and later books that range from Annemarie Selinko's historical romance, Desiree, to Tolstoy, George Eliot and -- of course -- Nabokov. Perhaps, she muses, her family relied too much on stories and writing. "Other families talked, we wrote: what we felt or hoped for, our complaints -- we wrote all this, as if we could not bear to look into one another's eyes and just talk."

Nafisi saw her home life with a mother with whom she argued bitterly and continually as a kind of prison; an early, unhappy first marriage, she records, was her bid for escape. Meanwhile, her father sought a different kind of escape in long-term romantic affairs with mistresses who for periods of time became part of the family circle. The turmoil that swirled around the family relationships was drama enough for most memoirs; in this case, it is accompanied by the backdrop of the turbulence of Iran itself, as Nafisi recalls seeing former friends and enemies (and relatives) end up executed by the Khomeini regime. She recounts her struggles to find purpose for herself without betraying her principles. Unusually for memoirs today, she is ruthlessly honest with her younger self and herself today, acknowledging her own frailties (as a result of childhood abuse by a Hajii Agha, a visiting cleric, she writes that she found it easier to confront the militia on the streets of Teheran than to sleep alone at night. Making the abuse itself more intolerable, she says now, was the fact that this behavior -- not uncommon -- "was that it was not talked about and acknowledged publicly. Airing the dirty laundry, this was called."

Nafisi is conscious that she is airing what her parents would have believed was their own dirty laundry, writing about their weaknesses as well as their heroic moments (such as her mother's support of her at critical junctures, including the night she feared she would miscarry her second child because of the Iraqi bombing of Teheran). Moreover, she notes, in Iranian society, "private lives are trivial and not worth writing about." Even her father's published memoir is a "cardboard version of himself" and his real life.

Readers can't help but be grateful to Nafisi for breaking her own silence, whether that was about reading Lolita in Teheran, watching the Marx Brothers in Teheran, or the ways in which her life took shape under the influence of the members of her extended family. The process of writing this memoir may not have produced the elusive 'closure' for Nafisi herself, but it did, she says, produce understanding: "a sense that this narrative might be the the only way through which we can acknowledge our parents and in some form bring them back to life, now that we are free, at last, to shape the boundaries of our own story."

That is a goal that transcends any cultural barriers. Similarly, while Nafisi's eloquent and thoughtful book is unquestionably a product of the author's specific background and experiences, it should appeal to any reader interested in this universal theme.

Having read READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN I was looking forward to knowing more about the author. I was very dissapointed.

I don't like women who whine about their mothers. Mother-daughter relationships are complicated and they are more complicated when both persons have strong, opinionated and rebelious characters. This mother-daughter relationship was doomed from the start and only got marginaly better as the mother got older. Ms. Nafizi is probably not an easy person to live with either, I hope her daughter tells us her story.

The interesting part, the one that kept me reading was the description of the progressive change in life in Iran and the effect it had on the intelectual community.

This book is worth taking the time to read, if you have the time and nothing better on hand, but try to get it on loan from the public library, don't spend your money on it or waste space in your home library to keep it.

Rita Sasso

An interesting book about family dynamics, human psyche, Iran during and after the revolution, plus summaries of certain periods of Iranian politics. I like that she is very honest about her own character and so in touch with her feelings. Also her accounts of Iranian intellectuals are very realistic.
However, Ms. Nafisi's interpretations of Shahnameh seem to be superficial and a disservice to one the greatest mythology books of mankind.

I just finished reading Mrs. Nafisi's book, "Things I've been Silent About".

It stirred many emotions in me. I loved it at times. I hated it at times. There were moments I became very sad.

I think books of this nature, with heritage, history, and nostalgia, have different effects on people of different age groups and backgrounds. I am a 67 year old Iranian man. When I was reading this book, I could smell the scent of I-Beta's chocolates, Khosravi's Pirashkis, and more importantly, the smell of fresh leather in the shoes and bag shops of Lalezar.
To my recollection there was no café across from Café Naderi. I think what comes to Mrs. Nafisi's mind was called Kaafé Jamshid at the beginning of Manoochehri from Ferdosi Avenue side.

I congratulate Mrs. Nafisi on this fantastic and candid literary masterpiece. Writing personalised memoirs can be very painful and difficult. I became more relaxed after I read the acknowledgement.

Mrs. Nafisi's late mother, like majority of mothers of that era, devoted her life to her children. This is evident from every line in the book.


Bahram Gusheh
Sydney, Australia

I did enjoy reading this book, but it was such a personal story that I couldn't really love it. It felt like this was the author's way of trying to heal from the many injustices she faced during her childhood rather than a novel that should be published and presented to the public. While it did have some good insights into the culture of Iran, it just lacked some of the sparkle that made Reading Lolita in Tehran such a great book.

The beginning of this memoir quickly drew me in - however by the end I had lost interest in it. The writer was very personal and engaging at first but seemed to become more remote as the memoir progressed. At times I felt bogged down in details about the politics in Iran - though she does point out that for Iranians, politics are an intricate part of life. This is a book I might need to pick up again in a few months and read again.

I loved "Reading Lolita in Tehran". As an Iranian-American it was also my own story; the story of the revolution and the betrayal (at the greater level, the betrayal toward a nation). Plus, my thirst for the literature was fully satisfied with the detailed analysis of Nabokov or Austen, etc.

But "Things I've been silent about" way passed my expectation. Even if Nafisi's childhood was a different kind of childhood (compared to my own childhood) still I couldn't stop feeling more and more related to her story, and I ended up having a total understanding and full empathy toward her.

"Things I've been silent about" is also the story of a betrayal, but it is more at a personal level. Through this story-telling she has depicted the image of an Iran (pre-1979 revolution) I had heard about, but I didn't know. An Iran I had always loved to know, but living in Diaspora had made this task too hard to accomplish, almost impossible.

I especially loved the way Nafisi remembers her father and I think the image of Mother is not as negative as some people have suggested. I find the book an honest look, even an effort to understand and to justify her parents actions and reactions, even to forgive them. It is a reflection over this haunting past, something that many of us need to do to get over many of our isuues! Nobody's all evil or all angel, and Nafisi mangages to show the values and also the shortcomings of her parents in such an elegant way, most importantly with love and compassion.

Honestly, I have never been a fan of history books, but what I love the most in Nafisi's writing is the way she can mix her personal history with the history of Iran and how easily she can connect to her readers. The way she grasped their attention and doesn't let go! Plus, I was so impressed with her craft of writing....The powerful ending of each chapter left me in awe, and each time, I had no other option than to keep reading the next chapter!

It was a wonderful book and I would definitely recommend it to all the Iranians and non-Iranians!