Saralee Says
What a brilliant concept for a book. Reading Lolita in Tehran - A Memoir in Books (Random House) is one of the best and most powerful works of literature that I have ever read. It affected me profoundly.
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian who taught literature in a university in Tehran. She was educated in the United States. Her father was a political prisoner, she supported the revolution to overthrow the Shah and the author lived through the horrors of war with Iraq and the suppression of women under the rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini. She left Iran in 1997 to return to the United States and is currently affiliated with Johns Hopkins University.
Imagine the rituals that many women in the Middle East experience daily. As you leave home - if you are allowed to - you must check to make sure your hair is not showing beneath your required headgear. You cannot wear nail polish or makeup and you must make sure that a robe covers any hint of color or skin so that you are judged modest. If you are a female student at a university, you must submit to another search before entering the campus (male students are exempt).
Nafisi, a professor of Western Literature, is eventually forced to leave the university in Tehran and courageously starts a book club for women only that secretly meets each week in her home. From the opening of the book, as Nafisi describes the colorful clothes hidden beneath each woman's chador, I was captivated by the daring personality of each of the book club's participants.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is a mixture of literary criticism, history and social commentary. The book is divided into literary discussions of Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), Henry James (Daisy Miller), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) and Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice).
What did you think about the author's choice of books for her club to secretly discuss? What authors would you have added if you had been a part of this secret club? I suggest A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. What about their decision to exclude men from their gathering? How does the information provided by the author affect the way you feel about the suppression of women in countries like Iran?
Larry's Language
Art can imitate and inspire our lives and author Azar Nafisi proves this again in her fascinating and unusual book Reading Lolita in Tehran. In a fundamentalist and repressive government which was waging a cultural, social, and religious war against women, the Nafisi book club was a rare act of courage.
While the books they read and discussed are classics in this country, in Iran they were foreign authors. One of the beauties of this story is observing how the lessons of Austen, Nabokov, James and Fitzgerald translate and relate to the daily lives of the students of Nafisi. How much difference do you think there was between the women in Pride and Prejudice and the women in Iran in terms of arranged marriages, second class citizenship, second class legal status and a rigid dress code?
More importantly for the women in Iran, these Western books served as inspiration for ideas about freedom and liberty. For Nafisi, as their teacher, the book club inspires her to argue that the right to free access to imagination should be a fundamental right for all people.
Join us for our next book club discussion which will feature Bad Men: A Thriller by John Connolly.
