Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Thanks to the dean for putting this on her "free library" shelf in the staff lounge. Thanks to our department secretary for picking it up - and then deciding that she didn't have time to read it now and dropping it on my desk. Even thanks to that book group down the road a hundred miles. I used to hang out on the periphery of the group - I got email invitations to their meetings - always on weeknights, school nights, when I couldn't possibly join them from a hundred miles away. They read it several years ago, before they dropped me from their email list, so I had heard of it.

I can't decide what was the thread that gave this work so much weight for me: the inside view of life in the Islamic Republic under the Ayatollah Khomeini and after; the conspiracy of a group of women who love literature and gather to discuss it in spite of the risks; the insights into Western literature as filtered through the minds of these women; simply the power and intimacy of a group of women. Those threads and many others are twisted and woven into a fabric of amazing beauty.

This is not a straight-line narrative. It is woven around the Thursday morning "class," but wanders back and forth through time: to Nafisi's earlier time in the US, to her initial encounters with each of the women in the group as students in her university classes before the Islamic Republic, to the lives and experiences of the women in the group, and her meetings with her mentor - her unidentified "magician." She groups her telling thematically by authors - or characters - Lolita, Gatsby, Henry James, and Austen. The themes of the books and the themes of their discussions - in their group or in the earlier university classrooms - form the framework for the book.

One of the women is in love with a man who has also been one of Nafisi's students. Their courtship takes place largely in the classroom and is a dangerous departure from the restrictions of the Muslim fundamentalist government. She writes of them, "They became addicted to the secure world they had created through words, a conspiratorial world in which everything that was hostile and uncontrollable became soft and articulated." Now there is a statement on the power of the word - written and spoken.

Another of my favorite bits is in her section guided by Austen. She uses a dance metaphor to define the difference between Persian and Western male/female interactions. Here she compares the stilted formality of eighteenth century dances to the seductive potential of classic Persian dancing. She also extends the dance metaphor to describe the interactions of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, in possibly one of the bests overall views of one of my favorite novels that I have ever read. It is too long to include here, but I am tucking it away in my file of favorite literary passages.