Imagine a world where you can be arrested for speaking out against your government, dancing at a concert or painting your fingernails. Where in your life would you find joy?
When real life is so oppressive it seems there are few places to turn, Azar Nafisi found a way out. When reality was unfavorable, she embraced a fictional world.
In "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books," Nafisi tells the story of her last years in Iran. She has resigned from her teaching post at the University of Tehran because she could not bring herself to comply with its rules.
Nafisi fills the void left in her life by teaching a secret class. She invites her brightest and most dedicated students to come to her house every Thursday to discuss literature. They read "Lolita," "The Great Gatsby," "Daisy Miller" and "Pride and Prejudice."
The memoir is divided up into four sections, each part corresponding to one of the books Nafisi and her class are reading. In this way, Nafisi skillfully relates the events of her life to the major themes of the novel she discusses in each section.
Nafisi primarily discusses her life in Iran during the 1990s, but she also brings us into her past to the Iranian Revolution and the bloody war Iran fought against Iraq from 1980 to 1988. She manages to show the reader the depth of the pain that Iranians, especially the women, endured (and still endure) in her country.
In tiny, delicious moments Nafisi allows us into her personal life. The book tells us a lot about Nafisi's life, but it does so in a less obvious way than most memoirs do. The focus is on the other characters' lives, their struggles and joys. She does a great job acquainting the reader with the major people in her life. The girls in her secret class, her adversaries and her husband are all fully developed characters who the reader comes to care about. Nafisi has a way of describing the people in her life — it is similar to a complete character dissection.
Nafisi uses the characters in the novels they read in her class to provide us with insight and comparisons to the people in real life. I can tell that she was, and still is, a professor of literature. Parts of the book go on for too long about these novels, giving the reader the impression that they are reading for class and not for leisure.
Another problem with the weight these authors and their famed novels have on the story is that not every reader of the memoir is familiar with them. I have never read Henry James, and I found the chapter devoted to him less interesting as a result. Not only was I not as engaged, but I was confused about major events since comparisons and parallels with the novels are relied upon so heavily.
Hearing the story from the perspective of a native Iranian is enlightening. It is a quiet, matter-of-fact account of the costs involved with authoritarian rule. The freedoms lost are not paraded about in the memoir — they are felt in the silences and the experiences missing from these characters' lives.
I would have loved for Nafisi to bear more of her own soul throughout the memoir. I would have felt closer to Nafisi if she would not have incorporated the fictional characters into her narrative so much. Still, the reader can take something away from this memoir no matter what their literary background.
