At first I was very suspicious of Reading Lolita in Tehran.
I delayed, afraid of one of those well-reviewed books that nobody actually finished. It is, after all, a book about books (sort of) by an Iranian college professor of English lit.
God, the dullness danger was high.
But I got sucked in pretty early and stayed there til the end. Author Azar Nafisi combines literature — Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Invitation to a Beheading and other towering works — and memoir to tell the story of her life in Iran during and after the revolution. She writes of oppression and morality police and the eight-year Iran / Iraq war and her children and her inability to accept the place established for women by the authorities. It is a stunningly well-written story and treatise.
To some, though, the book is politically incorrect.
From Wikepidia:
Nafisi’s book has earned some criticism by Columbia Professor Hamid Dabashi who sees the book as basically being propaganda for the Bush administration to attack countries like Iran and Iraq. (The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2006) Dabashi wrote a critical essay in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English weekly Al-Ahram. In it, he used the late literary scholar Edward Said’s work on Orientalism to critique Nafisi’s memoir as evidenced in this quote: “By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: ‘We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.’ Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project.”
Wow. Wonder what Nafisi did to Dabashi to deserve that.
The Washington Post in 2004 ran a piece that said the then-new book already was outdated and was not widely read by Iranians.
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….
In the end, Khatami failed to change the structure of Iran’s government, which today remains dominated by clerics who answer only to themselves. But his election, and the landslides that followed for reformists, represented titanic public rejection of the suffocation Nafisi made so vivid in Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. She used 343 pages and uncommon eloquence to describe the intrusion of the state (using the justification of religion) into every element of daily life.
But, but, but… “Reading Lolita” is and always has been a history, not current events. History doesn’t get outdated. It gets memorialized. And Nafisi does tha beautifully.
Tags: Azar Nafisi, Books, Reading Lolita in Tehran