Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi, Random House, 2004
Reviewed by Linda Carlson, May 2008
Ms. Nafisi, who had attended college in Norman, Oklahoma of all places, was a newly-hired professor of English literature at the University of Tehran when the Iranian Revolution began. What happened next was probably repeated in some form many times over with other educated, progressive Iranians. Ms. Nafisi resigned, then taught briefly at the University of Allameh Tabatabai, before leaving Iran forever in 1997.
The author’s descriptions of daily life in Tehran -- wearing the headscarf, listening for the tread of the “morality police” on the stairs, being careful about the color of one’s socks and about never being seen on the street with a non-related male, and pondering the future of her female students and her own daughters within a system in which women and girls had virtually no freedoms -- helped me understand a tiny bit of the emotional and mental grind of being an Iranian woman in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Reading Lolita in Tehran in Seattle was slow going for me, primarily because I had previously never read any Henry James or Vladamir Nabokov. I find it quite delightful that it took an Iranian woman to introduce these western classics to me. Just as she will never be able to separate Austen from her memories of Turkish coffee on Thursday mornings with her girls in Tehran, I suppose I shall never be able to separate Nabokov from my memory of a particular Vancouver pizza place during late August.
This past summer Iran was once again the backdrop for student uprisings and government violence. It was reported that the formerly youthful, idealistic “children of the revolution” were cracking heads and taking names in the streets of Tehran. I’m sure that Ms. Nafisi was reading those same reports, and aching for “her girls,” at least the ones who didn’t leave the country when they could.