goodreads | Reading Lolita in Tehran

Title: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Author: Azar Nafisi
Genre: Non-fiction, Cultural
Rating: 6/10
# pages: 343
Date read: December, 2008

Summary: In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to its repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels.

For two years they met to talk, share and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color". Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of "morality guards," the daily indignities of living under Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however and they became "essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity", she writes.

Review: "A Memoir in Books" - the concept sounded fascinating. Especially for a book lover like me. Unfortunately, it didn't really work for me. It ended up taking me almost a month to read this book, because it just didn't capture me. Not that it was boring, and I enjoyed it while I was reading it, I just found it all too easy to put down, and found myself forgetting it for weeks on end because I had more interesting books to pick up in its stead.

Also, the "in books" part of the memoir seemed almost added on. I think I would have enjoyed it more had it just been a memoir in its own right instead of Azar trying to tie everything up with the books that she'd decided 'fit'. Because the parts about her life in Iran were absolutely fascinating, and there were some quotes that'll stay with me for a very long time, (eg. "Criminals should not be tried. The trial of a criminal is against human rights. Human rights demand that we should have killed them in the first place when it became known that they were criminals" - Ayatollah Khomeini - pretty representative of the revolution of 1979), as I really knew much too little of what happened there.

I hadn't read many of the books she mentioned (mainly "Lolita", "The Great Gatsby", something by Henry James (never did find out which book it was) and "Pride and Prejudice), but don't think that made too much of a difference in my opinion of the book, as the events refered to were pretty well described.

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