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Title: Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books by AZAR NAFISI ISBN: 0-375-50490-7 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.92 (78 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Experiences of a Persian girl
Comment: Before I start, I should say that Dr.Nafisi is a great writer with wonderful skills. However, what she writes is not necessarily true. I lived in Iran for 18 years and I moved to the US recently. I found her story completely untrue. she lived in tehran, the capital, just like me. and the year she decided to teach "western literature" to her seven female students was 1995 meaning that Iran was pretty much modern.
I read all these literature books that she mentioned in my classes in high school. Neither I nor my professors had any problem with teaching the books. moreover they were not scared of the government as she describes this "too risky". I just want people to read such books with an open-mind and do not believe everything that they read or here.
Rating: 5
Summary: Sex with a man you loathe. . .
Comment: Reading the reviews and the dust jacket, you can get the idea that this is a book about a book club. For this reader, it is more directly about the impact of the Islamic revolution on the lives of educated women in Iran. There women are required at the risk of their lives to wear the "veil," which symbolizes the surrender of their independence to a government that uses fear and intimidation to control them and, in the words of the author, make them "irrelevant."
The author, now living in the US, tells of almost two decades in Iran, as a teacher of English and American literature. She tells of the great hopes for reform after the fall of the Shah and the return from exile of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and with her we watch in horror as the revolution takes Iran by force instead into its medieval past. There are arrests, murders, and executions and those who can, flee to the West. The transformation of Iran is charted by the repressive attempts to make women invisible, by covering them in public from head to toe. It becomes a world in which wearing fingernail polish, even under gloves, is a punishable offense. And punishment, as we learn, is typically brutal.
The author escapes from this violence into the imaginative world of Western novels (from Nabokov to Dashiell Hammet) where she finds democratic ideals expressed in fiction's ability to help us empathize with other people. For her, it is the heart that has gone out of the gun-wielding moral police that want to sweep away all but complete submission to their fundamentalist form of Islam. And while she is a teacher, she must deal with classes filled with students who have been polarized by the political forces around them. All, curiously, are in single agreement that the West is corrupt and absolutely evil. Meanwhile, the novels of Western writers engage them, sometimes furiously. A wonderful sequence in the book concerns a mock trial in the classroom in which "The Great Gatsby" is brought up on charges of immorality.
"Lolita," we discover, becomes a story of a girl who finally escapes from the clutches of a man who wants to erase who she is and turn her into a figment of his imagination. It's not an allegory of Iran, Nafisi insists, but it's hard not to see the parallels. The contamination of personal relationships between men and women and its impact on love and marriage inform their readings of James and Austen. Meanwhile, even as her classes meet to argue the merits of these authors, their books are disappearing as one bookstore after another is closed down.
Added to all this is an account of living through eight years of war with Iraq, while missiles fall on Tehran and the numbers of casualties on the front lines mount. After leaving teaching, the author assembles a hand-picked group of former students, all female, to meet weekly at her home and talk more about books. Here the individual personalities and histories of each come to the fore, and we get a glimpse (as in fiction) into personal worlds experienced intensely under circumstances that have nearly robbed them of their identities.
It's easy to go on and on about this book. There is so much packed into it. Needless to say, I recommend it highly, especially to anyone who loves books or has taught literature. Obviously, it also informs many gender issues. For male readers, such as myself, it is like an extended version of Virginia Woolf's illuminating "A Room of One's Own." The author and her young students show how the lives of both men and women are impoverished in a world where one sex attempts to assume control over the other. For me, the book is best summed up in the author's words near the end: "Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe."
The books is not a polemic, and as the author would be first to admit, there are many other voices to be heard on the subject of Iran, its government, and its role in the world. For this reader, her book opens a door into a complex subject that invites one to read more and know more.
Rating: 3
Summary: An Enjoyable, Insightful Read
Comment: Nafisi does a nice job of taking the reader into the lives of women forced to live under Islamic rule in Iran. Anyone interested in the struggle for gender equality or a better understanding of the life lived by many Iranian women should enjoy this book. Perhaps it strays a little too far from the theme of forbidden Western literature into the relationships between a professor and her students but if one understands that the examples of illegal novels serve as a fine, albeit small, example of oppression then the book's purpose is well served.
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Title: Middlesex : A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides ISBN: 0312422156 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Life of Pi by Yann Martel ISBN: 0156027321 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown ISBN: 0385504209 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 18 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd ISBN: 0142001740 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 28 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Namesake : A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri ISBN: 0395927218 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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