The negative reviews of this book are odd to me because the writing is very clear and interesting. I also think the literary analysis going on here transcends what I consider to be “book club” discourse, because these are students and a qualified professor really thinking through the difficult questions raised by texts.
The story in this memoir is about a college literature in Tehran meeting with a group of young women to discuss controversial, banned, and restricted books. But these are anti-Islam or anti-Iran texts; they are Western canon books like Jane Austen, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Scott Fitzgerald (as the main section of the memoir break into) with lots of others discussed and intermixed.
There’s an interesting paradox here, because while Nabokov did write a lot of anti-authoritarian texts like Invitation to the Beheading and Bend Sinister (both briefly discussed here), it’s Lolita that is most widely considered — obviously the title suggests this.
I love the novel Lolita, and I don’t like discussing it with almost anyone because there’s a lot of people who’ve never read it with very strong opinions about it. I find it perfectly understandable to not want to read it — it’s about child rape, but I don’t like the idea that’s developed around people’s fascination of NOT reading it and what that proves about them. The women here adore it because they are reading from a country in which girls as young as Dolores Haze in the novel as routinely married to men much older than Humbert. So they see the book as indictment of the fantasies men tell themselves to justify deplorable actions. And I don’t think that Western culture gets to claim any real moral authority on the issue other than to have unsanctioned the behavior and abuse.
Anyway, this is the kind of book that makes me want to read a million more books, and I like that.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Lolita-Tehran-Memoir-Books/dp/0812979303/ref=sr_1_1?crid=17L2H83JPNKU&keywords=reading+lolita+in+tehran+by+azar+nafisi&qid=1556067032&s=books&sprefix=reading+lol%2Cstripbooks%2C176&sr=1-1)