Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
Fiction is important. It’s a fundamental way to make sense of reality and practice empathy. The story of Iran in the past 40 years is not one that we experience often in the U.S., let alone that story from a woman’s perspective. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi tells of her experiences teaching Western literature in Iran during and after the revolution, first at university, and later, in secret, holding classes in her home for her devoted female students. She tells of their stories and their experiences as seen through the lens of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov.
This book was phenomenal. Part memoir and part literary critique, it offers an incredible in-depth look at the experiences of women in the Islamic Republic of Iran, their struggles with the restrictions of their personal freedoms, their arguments for and against the wearing of the veils, linking their stories with the ones they read.
The writing in Reading Lolita was fantastic. Nafisi is eloquent, her sentences beautiful and she tells her story with an incredible amount of compassion, teasing out the nuances of her and her students’ lives in the broader context of the politics of Iran, through the revolutions, the Iran-Iraq war, and the religious and political rhetoric.
This is a book that everyone should read if they are interested in the Middle East, women’s rights or western literature.
— Jaime Cary
