Azar Nafisi: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON


In 1995 in Tehran, Azar Nafisi resigned from her job and decided to fulfil a life's dream. Selecting seven of her best female students of all ages, she formed a private class which met in her home once a week to discuss forbidden works of Western literature: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, Austen.

For two years this group met, each woman entering Nafisi's apartment in her black robe, bringing her own baggage of anger, fear, resentment, frustration.

Once inside, they would put aside their robes and emerge as individuals, dressed colourfully and ready to apply their own life experiences to those Western classics.

Nafisi was educated in the United States and Europe, demonstrated with other Iranian students against the Shah, and returned to Iran in 1979, the year the Shah fled and the mullahs took over. She taught English literature at the University of Tehran until she was expelled for refusing to wear the veil, and resigned from her next job in 1995, sick of the increasing power of the morality police who constantly harassed both her and her students. Now, she's back in the West, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Boston.

This book is Nafisi's account of that group, and of the lives and experiences of herself and her students. It's very serious and literary, and the inherent scholarship will make even well-read New Zealanders blush.

But what's really striking are this memoir's underlying points: that reading is an individual relationship between book and reader; and that Western literature can offer a path out of a tightly constrained world whose culture is "shaped by the colourless lenses of the blind censor". Here, ideas fly freely and can be supremely liberating, even a rebellion of sorts.

Lolita, so controversial in the West, becomes symbolically the most meaningful book to these women, who intuitively understand that the "desperate truth of Lolita's story is the confiscation of one individual's life by another ... Nabokov, through his portrayal of Humbert, had exposed all solipsists who take over other people's lives".

Thus do readers shape the meaning of literature. In the end, Nafisi is probably too intellectual, too firmly entrenched in the realm of literature and ideas, to appeal to a hugely wide readership.

We wait for more details of her students' lives, and are not rewarded with quite as much cinema verite as we might hope. Nevertheless, this is certain to re-inspire many readers back to the classics, and hopefully remind us, here in the land of easy-come, easy-go, that some things should never be taken for granted.

Publisher: Hodder

Price: $25