Reading Lolita in Tehran
A Memoir in Books
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3.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • A “brilliant” (The Boston Globe) memoir of one Iranian teacher’s steadfast pursuit to educate young women under a government that sought to stifle them
“An inspiring account of an insatiable desire for intellectual freedom.”—USA Today
“A poignant, searing tale about the secret ways Iranian women defy the regime.”—Salon
A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some of the women came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely—their stories intertwining with the novels they were reading by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, as fundamentalists seized hold of the universities and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the women in Nafisi’s living room spoke not only of the books they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams, and disappointments.
Azar Nafisi’s luminous masterwork gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny, and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This memoir introduces us to a group of women who risked their lives to educate themselves in the face of brutal fundamentalism. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, author Azar Nafisi recounts her time leading an all-female book club in ’90s Iran, reading books that the tyrannical regime deemed subversive by authors like Jane Austen and Vladimir Nabokov, while also delving into her struggles, like being fired from university teaching for political reasons and her eventual emigration. Nafisi artfully depicts the book club as an energizing sanctuary of freedom, drawing thoughtful connections between the books they read and the demeaning treatment of women in the society outside her doors. Her contrasting writing style is a treat for readers, balancing the near-magical atmosphere of her book club with the harsh realities of war and morality-squad raids outside in Tehran. If you believe art and literature are essential mediums of resistance against oppression, you’ll be inspired by this book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This book transcends categorization as memoir, literary criticism or social history, though it is superb as all three. Literature professor Nafisi returned to her native Iran after a long education abroad, remained there for some 18 years, and left in 1997 for the United States, where she now teaches at Johns Hopkins. Woven through her story are the books she has taught along the way, among them works by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James and Austen. She casts each author in a new light, showing, for instance, how to interpret The Great Gatsby against the turbulence of the Iranian revolution and how her students see Daisy Miller as Iraqi bombs fall on Tehran "Daisy is evil and deserves to die," one student blurts out. Lolita becomes a brilliant metaphor for life in the Islamic republic. "The desperate truth of Lolita's story is... the confiscation of one individual's life by another," Nafisi writes. The parallel to women's lives is clear: "we had become the figment of someone else's dreams. A stern ayatollah, a self-proclaimed philosopher-king, had come to rule our land.... And he now wanted to re-create us." Nafisi's Iran, with its omnipresent slogans, morality squads and one central character struggling to stay sane, recalls literary totalitarian worlds from George Orwell's 1984 to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Nafisi has produced an original work on the relationship between life and literature. (On sale Apr. 1)
