Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

We all have dreamsthings we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisis dream and of the nightmare that made it come true.

For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were readingPride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolitatheir Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran.

Nafisis account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisis class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of the Great Satan, she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense.

Azar Nafisis luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of womens lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice.