Reading Lolita in Tehran--Azar Nafisi
reviewed by jenn walker 3.14.04
Unlike
my fellow reviewers, I’m generally a fan of the New York Times Bestseller.
I like to know what the people are reading. I like to know what Oprah and the
daily morning shows will be talking about. If I went to cocktail parties, I’d
prefer to be fluent. I don’t often go to cocktail parties, but I don’t
let that deter me. So when I started to hear noise about “Reading Lolita
in Tehran,” (I do work on the inside of the literary scene) I was interested.
Plus, a book about books, I’m always interested in that.
Even so, my first impressions of the book were not positive. Something about Azar Nafisi’s writing style put me off. She sounded like someone a little too impressed with the tale she had to tell, someone pulling all of her favorite words out of the closet and spreading them around her living room. The first chapter was a bit grueling, as she described the girls in her living room, discussing Lolita. There was an especially dark moment when each of the girls described what the word “upsilamba” meant to them. I thought my relationship with this book might end on page 18. It’s a good thing I had that New Year’s Resolution pushing me on.
Nafisi writes “A novel is not an allegory….it is the sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel.” She wants us to inhale the experience (even the parts that remind you a bit of sitting next to the overly chatty person on the bus.) Her point being that Nabokov, Austen, Fitzgerald and James create an opportunity for readers to walk a mile in shoes we might not otherwise even see in the mall. Perspective and empathy, Nafisi builds her case, such as were severely lacking in a certain bit of history of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
As she spells out her beliefs about fiction, Nafisi leads us to apply the same rules to her own tale. “Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels—the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.” Nafisi draws out her characters for the reader, people we’d like to be, intelligent and informed, devoted to literature and the fate of their country. As the teacher, Nafisi is always carrying a few extra books around, eating crème glaces in cafes in Tehran, always scribbling a note down, like Hermione Granger or Rory Gilmore. When she has you hooked, and convinced you could be any one of “her girls” she latches on to your empathy and leads you through the tale of what it was like to be in Iran, not long ago, trying to teach or even to read these “decadent” Western Novels.
My own understanding of Iran’s history is sketchy at best, and though I’d like to tell you this book changed that, well, I can’t. Nafisi is telling the tale of the politics and the religions and the war, but she leaves it in the streets and the newspapers, and tells you what goes on in the living rooms, the classrooms, the cafes. She writes of the pompous guy in the front row of a literature class, struggling to be more popular by joining a controversial organization. We hear about the Ayatollah from the giggling girls in the back row who really haven’t done the reading, but like to hear themselves talk. And then there are about eight girls, all about 18 years old, just trying to live their lives. They want to find husbands, they want to read books, and sometimes they lie to their parents about where they’ve been in the afternoon. They are smart and funny, and they fight with each over ideas and the best seat on the sofa. Oh, and they can be arrested for looking at a man, for wearing nail polish or letting a bit of hair slip out from under a veil. People you already know, surviving in a place you can just barely imagine.
Nafisi left Iran in 1997 and now works at Johns Hopkins University, where, I like to imagine, she is an avid Interlibrary Loan patron. Though she never comes right out and says it, her book has a pulse of warning. “Other people’s sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves, what about me? What does this say about my life…?” She describes her time in England and Switzerland and Norman, Oklahoma as a young girl, always with a view of Iran in the back of her mind. The Iran she came from was a beautiful and diverse, and far more tolerant. Her family was educated; her father was the mayor of Tehran. She was active in protests as the government began to collapse and reshape itself. Through it all, as newspapers were shut down, people were tried for crimes and disappeared without warning, as the debate formed over whether women should be forced to take up the veil, she believed in a sense of the rational. That government would never cross a certain line of ridiculousness. They could see the worst case scenario, they fought against it, and never believed it could happen until the day it was too late. She writes “What we had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven.”
In one moment though,
Nafisi winked at me from the pages of her own book. This literature teacher,
some cross between Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society” and a
favorite aunt who just happens to be a superhero, left me a potent warning against
complacency. “In retrospect, when historical events are gathered up, analyzed
and categorized into articles and books, their messiness disappears and they
gain a certain logic and clarity one never feels at the time. For me, as for
millions of ordinary Iranians, the war came out of nowhere one mild fall morning:
unexpected, unwelcome and utterly senseless.”