Ravings of a Textual Deviant

I was going to say that I’m not one for memoirs, but hey, I read blogs, so who am I kidding.

Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, was very hard for me to read–not because it wasn’t well written, but because it was. (I’m haunted by the brief scene in which the women tell each other that compared to women in Somalia and Afghanistan, they live like queens–this against a background being persecuted for mere suspicion of wearing makeup!) Nafisi, a professor of English literature, left her place at Tehran University because she chose not to wear a veil. She formed a secret literature class with some of her female students, in which they read Henry James, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nabokov. The experience of reading novels seamlessly blends into the everyday experiences of women in the Islamic Republic. Fiction is not simply something one reads; it pervades everyday life–in the stories that the government tells the people, that the people tell each other, and that they tell themselves. Not that this is a new concept, but the background against which it’s set provides high contrast. I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time. It might even prompt me to read Lolita.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2004 at 11:42 am and is filed under Off the Shelf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.