Total Page : 559
Publisher : Wheeler Publishing
Publication Date : 2003 10
>> Didn t grab me
Not only am I one of the last people in the world to read this book I m one of the few who didn t like it And I really wanted to like it I generally enjoy reading and learning about life in the Middle East but this book just did not grab me
One problem was my fault I haven t read all of the books she and her girls have and they played an important part of the story But I also found the sequence of events confusing it s not entirely chronological I found Nafisi s writing style to be detached almost arrogant and therefor I found myself not really caring what happened to her personally I would have like to have known more about each individual girl in her reading circle
>> Reading Lolita In Tehran
Reading Lolita in Tehran is both a profile in courage and a literary lecture all in one telling us how art can change lives and sustain us as humans A Nietzsche once said We have to have art in order not to die of the truth In Tehran unfortunately people are dying because of the truth
Azar Nafisi skillfully interweaves her lectures on Nabokov Fitzgerald and James with her interaction with a group of young Iranian women who she calls her girls as they join her in a secret class to study Lolita and other important works of fiction We get to know each of the young women individually who represent a cross section of Iranian society religion and politics as the book progresses We are also privy to the treacherous landscape Nafisi and her students had to navigate during those troubled times before Nafisi left Iran for good in 1997 As she says in her book she left Iran but Iran did not leave her
The classes favorite book fittingly was Nabokov s Invitation to a Beheading This is the story of Cincinnatus C who has been interred and condemned to death for committing the sin of gnostical turpitude or in other words being different This is a crime punishable by beheading In this novel the villains are the totalitarian rulers trying to posses and control imaginative minds In Lolita the villain is Humbert Humbert He is the one with the imaginative mind Lolita is also a metaphor for Iran who is victimized by the Islamic oppressor and who control the action of females by placing them under the veil and exploiting their nubile young bodies by lowering the marriage age to nine This is an age of innocence that would make Humbert himself blush with shame
>> How many years can some people exist before they allowed to be free
More than a combination of literary criticism and memoirs of living through the totalitarian ruthlessness of Islamist ruled Iran this book essentially examines how the author and a group of friends took refuge in literature from the totalitarian nightmare
And at the same time using that literature to make sense of life under Islamo Nazi repression
The women in the group are able to make analogies of the works of Vladimir Nabokov Jane Austen Henry James and F Scott Fitzgerald with the society in which they live
The villain of Nabokov s Lolita Humbert rapes a twelve year old girl and thus the book is about the confiscation of one individuals life by another
Humbert has tried to shape another soul according to his own hopes and dreams
So the author is taking revenge on the Ayatollah and the Mullahs for confiscating the lives of the people of Iran for their war against women
This is a society in which girls are punished most brutally for wearing coloured shoe laces running in the school yard or licking ice cream in public Where women are flogged for wearing nail polish
Marxist and left wing feminists in the West pour scorn on taking up the cause of oppressed women in Iran as the Iranian Marxists did at the beginning of the Islamic Revolution of 1979 before they themselves became victims
They claimed that there were bigger fish to fry the author explains That the imperialists and their lackeys need to be dealt with first Focusing on women s rights was individualistic and bourgeois and played into their hands
What imperialists asks the author acting as a much needed voice of true conscience Do you mean those battered and bruised faces on television confessing to their crimes Do you mean the prostitutes they recently stoned to death or my former school principal Mrs Parsa who like the prostitutes was accused of corruption on earth sexual offences and violation of decency and morality for having been the minister of education For which offenses was she put in a sack and then shot or stoned to death Are those the lackeys you are talking about and is it in order to wipe these people out that we have to not protest
Azar Nafisi has been indeed accused by leftist and Islamist radicals in the West of serving the imperialist or neoconservative cause by writing this novel
So once again the dreams of the people of Iran to enjoy the same freedom Nafisi s leftwing critics in the West enjoy are denied
Like Humbert in Lolita the Western Left want to confiscate the lives of the long suffering people of Iran and shape them according to the formers own hopes and dreams
Like Humbert and like all great myth makers they try to fashion reality of their dream and end up destroying reality and their dream
Nafisi is a true feminist who really cares about the rights and welfare of women unlike so many left wing self styled feminists in the West who want people moulded according to their ideals and have never spoken up for the persecution of women by Islamists for their own selfish reasons
