Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Azar Nafisi

Dec 2003 · Sold by Random House

About this ebook

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s 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 reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran.

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

Praise for Reading Lolita in Tehran

“Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women who must meet in secret to explore the forbidden fiction of the West. It is at once a celebration of the power of the novel and a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped. The ayatollahs don’ t know it, but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic.”—Geraldine Brooks, author of Nine Parts of Desire

Ratings and reviews

I tried to read this book and I even went to a talk given by Ms. Nafisi in Vancouver, Canada in case I had missed something. I lived under those conditions that the characters in her book club had lived, but the book about this "Book Club" is written in isolation from the contemporary Iranian history and the political and social events of those times. It is designed for the North American audience with limited or no clue about what was going on in Iran, so they can say wow Lolita was even read in Tehran! I can imagine many interesting or awkward events that could be fall such a group, but I found none of that in this book. The book is written as if the surrounding society and its people were irrelevant. The long passages of literary criticism and commentary, while earth shattering events are happening in the street were very irritating. The people who would like it would be literary fans of Nabokov as it has nothing to do with real lot of women and people in Iran of those times. The title should have been "READING LOLITA" in large font and in a very small print "in Tehran" should be used as a sub-title.

This book was a required read for a college class group...I enjoyed this book and would reread it now.

It is soooooooooo long. The author adds things that really doesn't matter.

About the author

AZAR NAFISI is a visiting professor and the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University. She has taught Western literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and the University of Allameh Tabatabai in Iran. In 1994 she won a teaching fellowship from Oxford University, and in 1997 she and her family left Iran for America. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic and has appeared on radio and television programs. Azar's book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, was published in 2003 to wide acclaim.