NEW
Library Project
Volume 3, Number 1 - Fall 2004
On the
Bookshelf
by Patricia Andres
Reading Lolita inTehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi. New York: Random House, 2003.
In her moving, sometimes harrowing account of life in Tehran from the late 1970s to the late ‘90s, Azar Nafisi foregrounds literature as a tool for nothing less than survival. Nafisi, who taught English at the University of Tehran and Allameh Tabatabai University during the Islamic revolution, finds literature is not a luxury but a necessity, a witness to a world beyond, which (quoting Nabokov) she sees filled with “tenderness, brightness and beauty” in contrast to the absurd, often tragic quality of everyday life in Tehran.
After resigning from her teaching post under pressure, Nafisi conducts a reading group for former students in her home. The informal literature discussions, which come to include coffee and a meal, become for the members a sanctuary, a place of freedom—a space, she says, where the music of a violin fills the void.
While she sees the literary lens as fuel for hope and change, Nafisi’s view of literature’s transformative power is never sentimental. In making sense of a senseless world where women must wear the veil and those with dissenting ideologies “disappear,” Nafisi embraces the deep structure of the novel—for example, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—for its essentially democratic nature. Her most beloved novels, like People and Stories—Gente y Cuentos sessions, are spaces where “oppositions do not need to eliminate each other in order to exist.”