For two years, Azar Nafisi risked the anger of local religious and secular authorities. Meeting secretly, she and seven of her most trusted and dedicated students met in Nafisi’s Tehran home to read from books considered decadent by the government. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the reading of Western text is considered anathema and contrary to the ideological stance taken by the ruling mullahs. Yet, during those two years, Nafisi and her students read from some of the greats: Fitzgerald, Nabokov, James, Austen.
That American and English literature could stir the hearts and minds of these Iranian women might be a lesson now, 25 years after the Revolution and amid an ever-increasing war in the Middle East. Instead, Nafisi’s remarkably compelling and often harrowing account of Iranian life since the Revolution collapses the literary into the literal, bypassing the traps that so often doom memoirs of stress and faith, to emerge fully immersed in the lives and struggle of her and her students.
Nafisi is an odd narrator. She grew up before the Revolution, where her father was mayor of Tehran and her mother was a member of parliament. She was educated in England and Switzerland, even lived in the United States, before returning in the beginning of the ’70s. She acknowledges the role of western interests in the downfall of the Pahlavi dynasty, while simultaneously feeling that it was the Iranian people and the intellectual elites that helped replace the dynasty with the more reactionary mullahs. She was part of the Iranian student movement, then watched as the Revolution took flight then fell apart amid chaos. She comes across as bitterly divided in her devotion to her country and its people.
Through their reading, she and her students find solidarity with the characters they encounter. In Jay Gatsby they see the same emotional battle with the past that they themselves feel towards the Islamic Revolution. In James they understand the desire to undermine expectation, to fight back for rights they feel inherent.
It is perhaps in Austen that the most poignant understanding takes root. Nafisi comes to believe that the drive towards the private within the public sphere becomes the essential conflict in life.
Her and her students know it all too well, as they are discovered, threatened, imprison and beaten. For reading books.
Beyond the narrative, however, a thread underlies the structure of Nafisi’s memoir. Deeply ingrained in her work is an abiding respect for literature, and her book easily becomes an apologetic for reading in general. Each of the books she reads is interpreted and brought to bear on the lives of the eight women involved. These aren’t simply readers responding to a work, however. They are well thought-out, coherent interpretations of key pieces of literature, the type of analysis that would be expected of an advanced student of literature.
They are the kind of analysis that would easily gain acceptance within an academic setting, but Nafisi’s narrative skill and emotional energy help keep them from tending to the dry readings so often found in our academies. She turns them into careful reminders of the value of western literature, a rediscovery of literature that is more than simply a recreation but instead an honest need.
Even with 57 weeks on the bestseller list, in both hardback and paperback, and numerous re-printings, the only question is which theme readers respond to more. Between her apology for literature, the story of the effect of western literature in Muslim countries and her stirring personal story, there is much that the reader can latch onto. Even after 57 weeks, there is no sign that “Reading Lolita In Tehran” will stop being read around the world.
