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 Novel uncovers women’s conflict in Tehran A Review By Monique Bos Aptly subtitled “A Memoir in Books,” Nafisi’s novel “Reading Lolita in Tehran” is both a beautiful tribute to the power of literature and a poignant portrait of life under a totalitarian regime. Nafisi, an Iranian professor, shapes her story — which also encompasses the narratives of her friends, family members and students — through books and the imagination. She begins by introducing us to the group of seven women who met at her home on Thursday mornings from 1994-1997 to discuss Western literature. The women arrive, Nafisi tells us, hidden under the dark robes and head scarves mandated by the radical Islamic government. Their removal of these garments in her home signifies their entrance into a space free from repression and control. In many ways, their world resembles the stark reality of a dystopian novel. Nafisi tells us that life seems to her a fiction or a dream, populated with characters from stories; she finds her reality in the pages of books. The man who serves as her mentor is a figure from one of Nabokov’s tales, and she refers to him only as “my magician.” To retain her identity and to provide her students with the words to develop their self-concepts, Nafisi turns to the complexity and ambiguity of literature, which contrasts keenly with the rigid dictates of the black-and-white regime. This complexity is what her totalitarian students find objectionable in her teaching and in the books they read. Yet their own demands create ambiguity and conflict in others; for example, she tells of one student, a devout Muslim who had voluntarily worn the head scarf and robe before the revolution, but who found the practice robbed of significance when it stopped being a matter of choice. Nafisi takes readers back to her first classes at the University of Tehran in 1979. She recounts life in a revolutionary society in which Communist and Muslim ideologues vied for control. Student committees purged the curriculum and faculty, and as the Ayatollah Khomeini and his radical Islamic supporters gained control, personal freedoms were increasingly limited. Protests and demonstrations often became violent; later she would learn that several of her students had been jailed and even executed. Nafisi tells how she and her colleagues — lovers of English literature in a dictatorship that considered the West evil — found themselves increasingly “irrelevant.” She withdrew from the university, though her colleagues and mentor eventually convinced her to return to teaching. When she later resigned, she continued her teaching with the class in her home until her immigration to the United States in 1997. Through the prism of several books and authors — “Lolita,” “The Great Gatsby,” Henry James and Jane Austen — Nafisi explores for readers the ways in which the regime closed down and thus involuntarily created space for intellectuals to grow and learn, to interact and think. She describes the repression her students face as women, but she is also aware of the difficulties placed on men. She criticizes the hypocrisy of the extreme Islamic government but recognizes the irony that many devout Muslims find their beliefs compromised by the regime. In describing her radical students, she is fair, even respectful. In short, she applies the moral ambiguity and character depth she so admires in great novels to her own story. “Reading Lolita in Tehran” is an elegantly written, exquisitely crafted memoir, a must-read for book lovers, women and anyone interested in a triumphant landscape of the mind. Bos is an editor in college publications. |
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