In her memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, Dr. Azar Nafisi processes her time living in Iran during the revolution and the war against Iraq, and she often does so by relating her experiences to the literature she taught as a professor. Though I wasn’t riveted or engrossed by the book, there are so many things I love and appreciate about it.
As someone who was technically taught some of the history in high school but hardly retained any of it, I learned a lot about the context and motivations surrounding the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s. I definitely don’t think this memoir provides, or was intended to provide, a comprehensive history or analysis, but I appreciated Nafisi’s personal reflections on the internal war the new administration was fighting against what they saw as the theft of their culture by the west, particularly America, how they grew in extremism, and how the people of Iran let them gain increasing control. When speaking of the dictator of their so-called republic, Nafisi writes, “Was it any consolation, and did we even wish to remember, that what he did to us was what we allowed him to do?” I’ve seen rare reviews that complain that Nafisi did not separate religion from politics enough and was thus attacking the Islamic religion or the women who choose to wear the veil for religious purposes, but I didn’t gather that at all. In fact, multiple times she acknowledges the unique betrayal those religious women felt when the regime hijacked, politicized, commoditized, and subverted their religion for political purposes.
I started taking note of every small thing the people of Iran could not do: shake hands with the opposite sex, make eye contact with them, or sit with them on buses; clap or whistle in public; lick ice cream in public (at least for women); wear colored shoelaces; run in a schoolyard; dancing; singing (for women); properly bury someone belonging to another religion; show whatever was considered an indecent emotion in public, like love; and mourn for wartime deaths because it was considered antiwar sentiment. Women couldn’t feel the wind or the sun on their skin because they were forced to cover themselves, and being allowed to do so in another country made them feel and appear like a stranger. The age of marriage was reduced to nine from eighteen, stoning was again the punishment for adultery and prostitution, and the best advice the administration could offer as the bombs dropped down on the people during the war versus Iraq was for women to sleep decently dressed so they would not be “indecently exposed” in the unfortunate event a bomb dropped on their house and they died. Nafisi touches on how desensitization to everything around them and what they are forced to endure becomes a mode of survival.
I appreciated that through her job as a professor and her role as a mother, she was privy to the feelings and reactions of multiple generations. Of course there was her own perspective as someone who experienced relative freedom growing up and saw the rise of the regime, and then she also included insights into her students’ perspectives who grew up with the regime. Regarding those students, Nafisi writes, “Their generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had.” We also got glimpses of the wee children’s responses: a ten-year-old boy who woke up his parents scared that he was having “illegal dreams,” or Dr. Nafisi’s own child who rocked herself back and forth saying “I hate myself. I hate myself” after the nonsensical discipline of a fellow schoolmate, the regime somehow making her feel complicit even as a child.
The book was riddled with literary references, which I loved. Some of my favorite parts were excerpts from novels. And perhaps the section I enjoyed the most was when they performed a mock trial for The Great Gatsby in one of her classes when the students objected to its “immorality.” She did totally spoil Daisy Miller for me though. But she also made me want to read it now. I’m glad I had read a lot of the other books she discussed and spoiled, like Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Washington Square, both so I could better understand the context and so I could avoid spoilers. She and her students would draw parallels between the characters and their own situation, none of which I thought insanely profound, but it just displays the potent and malleable nature of fiction, how you can interpret and mold each reading experience to your own life. At the end, she was discussing with a friend how the Jane Austen she read in Britain during her schooling abroad was “not the same Austen” she read in Tehran, as time, place, and political climate strongly influence the act of reading.
Perhaps the reason the memoir never fully engrossed me was Nafisi’s writing. She is a professor that is used to writing literary analyses, and that was apparent quite often, but that didn’t really bother me, though I can see how a lot of people might find that a bit dry. As a literary major myself, those parts felt natural to me. However, I do think that Nafisi maintained a distant, almost scholarly tone throughout, not intending to form a close relationship with the reader but to inform, so it was jarring when she would randomly add flowery sentences in the midst of her straightforward prose. And the dialogue felt unnatural—no one actually talks like that, so polished and astute. It did feel like Nafisi refined the speech of herself and those she esteemed, which might not be the most realistic for nonfiction, and occasionally provided a stark contrast to the speech of those she did not esteem, which might be unfair. There was also too much repetition of the phrases “I wonder if you can imagine…” or “Imagine [such and such].” It would be an interesting exercise to count how many times the word “imagine” was repeated throughout the memoir. She constantly reminded the reader that these were her personal recalls as she’s writing. Phrases like (paraphrasing), “I can remember…” or “when I think of it now” or “As I’m writing this…,” etc. And sometimes it worked to create a nostalgic atmosphere, but most of the time I just felt like it was overused.
