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Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books

In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color."

Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of "morality guards," the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became "essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity," she writes.

They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran.

When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense.

Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran.

el - As a liberal I consider opposing viewpoints and also support literature and freedom. This book is part of an argument in favor of not abandoning Iraq to religious extremists. This is not an argument for making Iraq a colony of the US exploited for oil and military bases. This is an argument in favor of freedom, not in favor of oppression from either side. You can see the value this administration places on democracy and tolerance everyday both in Iraq and here in America. But it is up to us liberals to now find a way to help fix Iraq, prevent a military occupation but also prevent another Iran. We need to also consider our own religious thought police at home as well.

Dissenting view - While I did learn about a different culture and a different life when I read this book, it did not hold my attention for very long. With so much emphasis on the meaning of her literature and not enough in the lives of the people around her, I felt as though I were sitting in a lecture, not reading a memoir. After awhile, it became more of a chore to read it than a pleasure. Hence, it was not my cup of tea, but quite possibly, it could be yours.