Reading Lolita In Tehran

Azar Nafisi's "memoir in books" has been on my reading list since the summer of 2008, when I read Lisa Adams and John Heath's Why We Read What We Read, which picks apart the Publishers Weekly and USA Today bestseller lists from the past 10 years (I think that ends up being 1996-2006; the book was published in 2007). It's a really fascinating book that more or less confirms what we all suspect-- most people are pretty happy to read shit. Reading Lolita in Tehran was far and away Adams and Heath's favourite book; from what I recall, it seemed to redeem the entire doubtless-depressing project for them. I found a copy at Aqua Books for $7 or so this spring and brought it with me with the 15 or 20 other titles to take up temporary residence at my summer sublet. Also, Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel is one of my favourite books of all time.

Reading Lolita in Tehran uses four sections to chronicle Nafisi's experiences a professor of American literature in revolutionary Iran. I'm a little less than halfway through, having finished the section on Lolita (which introduces Nafisi's intimate class of seven of her most studious female students who meet in her living room to study novels forbidden by the Iranian government) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, in which Nafisi describes her first year of teaching at the University of Tehran during the early years of the revolution. 

 I'm really excited about the basic premise of the book-- namely, that literature, and the study of literature, can be a radically subversive enterprise. It's so easy even for me, as a literature major, to assume that studying literature is entertaining but ultimately self-serving and irrelevant. This notion probably won't cease to bother me-- there are, after all, people starving in the streets of my own city while I pay a lot of money to read books all day. However, studying liberal arts has taught me that the major movements of history, especially the revolutions, have their roots in philosophical, religious and literary texts. Reading Lolita in Tehran gives us two of these movements, or communities-- the Islamic Republic of Iran, shaped, formed and created by the doctrines of the Qu'ran, and Nafisi's class, informed by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen. The consequences of reading these texts in the Islamic Republic of Iran are dire, and although we in North America rail against censorship as a violation of our innate right to free speech, the Iranian censors, in a way, take literature much more seriously than we possibly can in our easy-going environment-- great literature is explosive, life-changing, person-forming and very, very serious. The scene I read recently, in which Nafisi's first-year students at the University of Tehran hold a highly-charged mock trial of The Great Gatsby, while real trials sentencing intellectuals to public stoning are going on around them, is an amazingly dramatic illustration of this.