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Article Excerpt
It was 2003 when a little-known Iranian expatriate and former English professor named Azar Nafisi released a memoir of her life during the revolution and the years following that became an international bestseller. The book won nearly universal rave reviews from even the most feared of book critics and was translated into more than thirty languages. Reading Lolita in Tehran." A Memoir in Books" weaves together many important stories concerning Iran's post-revolutionary politics, the fate of women under Islamist rule, and the difficulty of teaching literature in a climate of political upheaval. However, the narrative strand used most frequently to describe the book involves seven young women who meet clandestinely at Nafisi's house from 1995 to 1997 to discuss western literature that was considered counter-revolutionary, starting with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. In effect, the women constitute a subversive book club--a free space where they are shown removing their government-mandated shawls and overcoats and sitting down together, with books in hand, to savor language and discuss outlaw literature in a deliberately all-female setting; in this space they also commiserate over their loss of freedoms, drink tea and eat sweets, and tell the stories of their own lives a sort of literary "Sex and the City" (except the city is Tehran). The story of Reading Lolita, then, in part is the story of a women's book club, and it would be impossible to examine Nafisi's success as a writer without understanding that her memoir coincided with an explosion of largely female book clubs and reading groups starting in the 1990s.
At their peak, American book clubs would claim as many as five to ten million female readers nationwide, according to Elizabeth Long's 2003 study, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Almond 1). In 2002, Newsweek magazine estimated a much lower number of readers in book clubs; they cited 750,000, but acknowledged this figure as conservative (Jones 55). Fueling the craze was Oprah Winfrey's nationwide book club, launched in 1996. Her selections of books and subsequent on-air discussions enriched authors and publishers alike. By the millennium, myriad specialty book clubs had formed, including groups of evangelical Christians, African American women, sci-fi fanatics, and countless others, some with chapters that met nationwide and some internet-based. As a direct result of the book club craze, according to Newsweek, "Every major publisher prints readers" guides, fills its Web site with discussion tips and author biographies and sets up conference calls between groups and authors" (Jones 56). Given the surge in women's book clubs across the country, it is not surprising that Nafisi's book, which affirms the power of literature and women as readers, might find a receptive audience in the US. In fact, the headline of a 2004 Publishers Weekly article asks, "Will Reading Lolita in Tehran Become One of the Year's Biggest Book Club Reads?" (Abbott 106). The article credits the book's success to word-of-mouth recommendations from readers and bookstore owners, good critical reviews, dynamic appearances by Nafisi to promote the book, and a nonfiction storyline that works off beloved literary classics. Reading Lolita in Tehran also coincided with a growth in published personal memoirs, which have become wildly popular in recent years. Another key to the book's reception was certainly the American public's growing awareness of Iran, which by 2002 President Bush had named as part of the "axis of evil."
(Un)Critical Reaction to Reading Lolita
In addition to being well-timed and drawing a vast readership, Nafisi's work also garnered lavish praise from fellow writers and professional critics representing a wide range of perspectives. For example, reviewers from the libertarian Reason magazine (Freund 64-65) to the conservative American Enterprise magazine (Pilon 56) to the leftist Nation (Emerson 11-12) lauded the book, some focusing on Nafisi's defiance of oppressive government and some emphasizing the plight of women in contemporary Iran. One of the few negative reviews ("surprisingly, disappointingly, dull") appeared in the neoconservative Commentary (Munson 75), an irony given recent criticism about the book's rightward leanings. Meanwhile, the paperback edition of Reading Lolita is crammed with four pages of blurbs from large daily newspapers, library journals, highbrow magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, and popular publications such as Entertainment Weekly. Many of the positive responses cite the book's depiction of the liberating power of great literature, such as Margaret Atwood's review in Amnesty magazine in which she calls Reading Lolita "enthralling" (4). Similarly, Heather Hewett of the Christian Science Monitor notes the book's "passionate defense of literature" that will "resonate with anyone who loves books, or who wants (or needs) to be reminded why books matter" (21 ). New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani was quick to exalt Reading Lolita, which she calls "an eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction on the refuge from ideology that art can offer to those living under tyranny, and art's affirmative and subversive faith in the voice of the individual" (E6).
What exactly is the transformative power of fiction as Nafisi portrays it? First, it is obviously the comfort readers take in literature during dark times. But Nafisi also demonstrates the unique ways that literature speaks to readers according to their particular circumstances, asserting that the setting in which they read a book helps determine its meaning. Early in the book, Nafisi describes the story she is about to tell as that of Lolita in Tehran, "how Lolita gave a different color to Tehran and how Tehran helped redefine Nabokov's novel, turning it into this Lolita, our Lolita" (6). The effect of time and place on literary works lies at the heart of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and explains why the book was not titled simply Reading Lolita.
For example, the setting in which Nafisi operates in her story, as a professor of English-language literature during a revolution in opposition to secular western values, exerts tremendous influence over the books she reads with her class. During a time of nightly news broadcasts of show trials, prisoner confessions, and reports of executions, Nafisi decides to assign The Great Gatsby rather than her original selection of writings by proletarian writer Mike Gold. When her more Marxist students condemn Gatsby (the character) for his opulence and the Islamists for his adultery, she puts the book on trial before the class. It is Nafisi's contention that Gatsby becomes a subversive book for her students precisely because it focuses unapologetically on a single individual's dashed dream at a time when competing ideologies in Iran Marxism and Islamism--would usurp all that is private and individual. On an American campus, Gatsby would hardly be a controversial book, but in Iran at this time, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic proves to be provocative. And just as Nafisi uses Gatsby to explore, among other things, the tension between art and ideology, she reads Pride and Prejudice with courtship in Iran amid diminishing women's rights in mind. She also uses the novel to discuss power relations as she believes Jane Austen sees them, saying that negative characters never truly hear or are influenced by the people around them--they lack empathy and democratic values. Similarly, she reads Lolita with an eye toward the young women of her book discussion group, who, like Nabokov's love interest, are powerless in the face of male authority. Lolita's tragedy, then, is "not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another" (33). Lolita's dreams for an ordinary life, like the ordinary hopes of the young Iranian women who felt trapped by post-revolutionary restrictions, are subordinated to the demand that they, like Lolita, enact someone else's...
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