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Summary: True Life is much more interesting than fiction!
Review: I read "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and felt its power and important political and social message. I told other people about it and passed it on to friends, male and female. I think the females enjoyed it more, perhaps because it is a book about a group of women in Iran. I am not sure if men will have more trouble understanding some of the oppression these women went through. Not only did they have to worry about the books they were reading, but they faced constant persecution from police regarding their dress, the rules about head covering and make up. The women in the book have to deal with terrible stress over the most minor issues and they live in constant fear. I found it tragic, inspiring and extremely interesting."Reading Lolita in Tehran" makes you appreciate the fact that in a free nation, one may read whatever book one chooses and wear whatever one chooses without fear of punishment. I think it is difficult for those of us who are fortunate enough to live in countries which have freedom of speech and expression to understand the kind of danger many people face in countries which do not have those freedoms. It is very surreal to imagine that you could be put into jail for reading or talking about certain books or even by looking at certain pictures in books.
It is important to know that there are countries in this world where women, especially, are oppressed, marginalized and kept as second class citizens. It is a terrible outrage and the author, who had to flee Iran, expresses these emotions with dignity and grace. She is truly a great writer and I hope she writes more books in the future. This would be a great book for a book club to read. I hope more people become aware of the struggle of Iranian women.
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Summary: Quality reading...
Review: I thought this was a really good quality book. I found many parts touching, and I enjoyed the insight into the lives of the students with whom Nafisi met on a weekly basis to discuss controversial literature. Nafisi is a very interesting person and an impeccable writer. My only criticism (and it's more a matter of personal taste than anything)....I got very bogged down in the middle. I wanted to learn more about Nafisi's students. I assumed that they would be the main focus of the book from reading the blurb on the cover. The first and last sections focused mostly on the women's gatherings, but the middle sections focused mostly on the war situation in Iran. Not that that particular part wasn't interesting (in fact it was absolutely necessary to illustrate the state of the Islamic Republic), but I just found myself more captivated by the struggles and opinions of the women. I greatly enjoyed reading the insight into some of my favorite novels including The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice. I also added plenty of works to my growing wishlist based on the commentary between Nafisi and her students.
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Summary: fascinating memoir in a turbulent time and place
Review: This fascinating book succeeds as a biography, as a political memoir and, for brief segments, as literary criticism. Structured into four sections labelled Lolita, Gatsby, James and Austen, the author discusses her life and the lives of others in Iran while drawing parallels and distinctions to these authors/books and their characters. The author was a literature professor at a major Iranian university though she eventually quit rather than wear the required veil. Much of the book discusses her conversations with students while at university, including the "trial" of The Great Gatsby, which many students found deplorable for its glorification of adultery, cheating and murder. After leaving the university, Nafisi began meeting at her home with a small group of female students. She describes them unveiling when they entered and again donning the clothes of oppression before leaving, and the conversations in between. Several of these women spent time in jail, not because of the book group, but for various infractions that we would find laughable if it didn't mean that these young women were incarcerated for years and abused in jail because of them. Everyone at these meetings knows people who have been killed or jailed by the regime, including early supporters, who lost control of the rebellion against the Shah and watched as the imams took over and became increasingly oppressive. The atmosphere seems very similar to the Russian Revolution except instead of being hijacked by a secular Stalin, the populist movement was hijacked by the fundamentalist Khomeini, and the author several times addresses her shift from activism to irrelevance. The point is also repeatedly made by the women that it is men's obsession with sexuality that imprisons them, though women pay the price, and that even men who disagree with the radicals often go along without defending their mothers and sisters, sometimes even taking additional wives. People not only struggle with living under a regime based on punishment and fear, but then are uncertain about whether or not to leave -- to stay and try to make a difference or to get out while they can. In addition to these heavy issues, we are treated to the author's observations about life in a very different culture, and we get her very insightful comments on several Western authors. If you are interested in politics, the Middle East, women's issues, literature or biography, you should read this fascinating memoir.
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Summary: Iranian women dont' give up!
Review: I read Ms. Nafisis novel in 4 days. At times I had to take a break and lay it down and just sit and think.... As an adult who spent 14 years from age 4-18 in Tehran and has a educated mother who like Ms. Nafisi, finally gave up her job working in the Bank, due to high level pressures to make her life miserable, I related and better understood the the dynamics of everyday life and how it affected my nuclear family. One better understands the necessity for freedom, and as always that Iranian women are some of the most courageous women in the world. I too remembered all the freedoms that were gradually taken away and more and more frequently, the oppression that surrounded society, when finally making it from from "healthy". Men, even men who are considered educated and fair, slowly had their internal compass reset into believing they had more say so than women. Some of these men, consider themselves to be quite "westernized" too. This type of behavior, eventually eats at the fabric of the Iranian society to make it unbalanced and hard to live in. The Iran-Iraq was in and of itself, was a war that has left a legacy of loss and bitterness that will take a generation to heal from. The daily reminders of the reasons(none of which were good) of why Iran was in war, the rations, the constant fear of bombings, and etc. has permanently scarred the Iranian people. Ms. Nafisi does a remarkable and "silky" job of weaving in and out of different classics. In the end, we are left feeling validated, when even a longtime Islamic student, who appeared not to agree with Ms. Nafisi's teaching methods, discloses that she has named her 11 month old, Daisy. I hope Ms. Nafisi keeps in touch with her students, and does a "Sequel" to this wonderful novel. I will re-read it sometime soon.
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Summary: Why we read
Review: Azar Nafisi was a professor of English and American literature at the university of Tehran during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, when a secular and increasingly egalitarian state became a religious theocracy. Ultimately forced out of her position in protest of new policies censoring teachers and students, especially restrictions placed on women, she formed a private study group with a few of her best women students. This memoir, divided into four parts named after English books or authors, interweaves the classes' reflections on the books with accounts of daily life for women in the new Iran. Why were these books so important to the mullahs that they had to be banned? she asks, and why were they so important to the readers that they were read anyway? Because they create a private space for readers, she argues. Because they declare that forbidden, that old-fashioned, that dangerous thing--that there is an independent and private self separate from but also shaped by the dictates of politics, religion, culture, and country. Because whether they seem to comply with the black-and-white morality of the religious zealots or not, whether they judge their characters or leave the judgments to the readers, what novels truly teach is not judgment but empathy. The lack of this empathy, Nafisi came to believe, was what created monsters, zealots, and dictators. The novels that were her escape from this world simultaneously provided a critique of it.
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Summary: Teaching literature in Iran during the revolution and beyond
Review: This incredible memoir tells the story of Azar Nafisi's life. But it is far more than that. It's the story of a world collapsing around her. And it's also the story of some works of literature. This adds depth and dimension to the experience of reading the book. Ms. Nafisi is Iranian and spent her college years in America. When she returned in 1979, there was a revolution going on. There were arrests, executions and new restrictions for everyone, especially the women. At the time, Ms. Nafisi was teaching English literature at the University. Later, she held clandestine classes in her home for a small group of women. They would arrive wearing heavy veils but would remove them when they got inside. And their discussions of literature often related to their own lives. She describes exactly what it is like to live in a totalitarian society where punishments are cruel for even slight departures from the rules. For example, one of her female students, along with four other female students visited a young male friend. All the women were heavily veiled and the six young people were sitting around a table on someone's patio. All of a sudden the police broke in and imprisoned the five women. They were medically checked for virginity and then each given 25 lashes before they were released a few days later. The charge was that they were not properly chaperoned. The young man, of course, was not charged with anything. By the 1980s there was a war with Iraq going on and by then Ms. Nafisi had two young children. I really related to her as a mother as the bombs fell around her on a nightly basis and she would sit in the hallway near her children and escape into her world of books. It is this love of books and the teaching of literature that is one of the many glues that hold the book together. In one of her classrooms the book "The Great Gatsby" is put on trial. In another classroom she discusses Henry James. And, of course, her interpretation of "Lolita" is the centerpiece from which flows her strong discourse on the view of women, not only in Iran, but throughout history. The best part of the book is that it thrust me right into the midst of the author's world. It certainly wasn't pleasant. But I applauded the way she coped with the inevitable and influenced others to deal with their circumstances. Ms. Nafisi loves her country and takes pride in her Persian heritage. And yet she deplores that fact that in public the women there are forbidden to experience something as simple as being able to feel the wind and the sun on their skin -- a freedom I've always taken for granted. Ms. Nafisi now lives in the United States with her husband and children. I feel glad she escaped but yet understand her sorrow for her country. This book is one of the best I've ever read. It altered my perceptions as well as enriched my understanding of literature. I loved it and give it my very highest recommendation. Don't miss it!
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Summary: A Stunning Example of the Power of Words Over Force
Review: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" is Azar Nafisi's account of several fascinating events that ultimately center on books and the context in which they are read. Ms. Nafisi is a professor of English literature who lived in the United States for many years and obtained her Ph.D. here before returning to her native Iran to teach in the prestigious Tehran University. In this book she recounts her radical student days in America (protesting the Shah's regime), the political upheaval that swept Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, her life of intellectual exile within her own country during the Iran/Iraq War, and her simple but highly subversive decision to teach a private women's seminar on forbidden English literature. While this book is very well written and interesting on many levels, more than anything else it provides a fascinating study on the value of literature in a given social and political context. Following her resignation from her teaching position in Tehran University because of government pressure and intrusion into her life, Ms. Nafisi decided to teach a private English literature seminar to a select group of her former female students. The students came from diverse social, religious and political backgrounds. Some were deeply religious while others lead lives that might be considered "interesting" even by liberal Western standards. Some had been imprisoned by the Iran's ruling regime while others had escaped the tumult of the Islamic Revolution relatively unscathed. One important thing these women had in common was that they were extremely intelligent and well educated. Many had read the works of Barthes and other Western intellectuals for pleasure and probably could easily hold their own in an English or American graduate program. Another was the fact that each of them had known life in Iran before the Islamic Revolution and each had strong personal feelings about living under an oppressive theocratic regime. What I found most interesting about this book was the new life that "old" texts by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and others took on within the deeply oppressive context of Revolutionary Iran. When the group read The Great Gatsby, for example, one of the principle themes they explored was how the book's wealthy characters-like most people in power--always broke things and then expected someone else to fix them. If this book was decadent and pro-western as the Iran's ruling clerics claimed, then how did one explain the critical manner in which it portrayed its most privileged characters? Did its author provide an objective analysis of his own civilization? Was this process threatening to Iran's ruling regime? Similarly, When reading Lolita the group concluded that the novel's villainous character Humbert Humbert fooled himself and attempted to fool his readers by blaming his victim, Lolita (as he called her) for her own rape. The group then drew a parallel between his behavior and that and Iran's revolutionary government, which often blamed the victims for the oppression it meted out to them. Humbert Humbert, in this case, was neither the innocent lover that he makes himself out to be, nor the villain that most discerning readers take him for. Instead, his exploitive and propagandistic behavior made him emblematic of tyranny in general. Equally as fascinating is the dynamic of Ms. Nafisi's class itself. The students did not always agree with each other and seldom came to neat and tidy conclusions about either the books or the context within which they read them. The students sometimes carried out subtle personal arguments with each other through their conflicting interpretations of the books. And while none of them enjoyed living under Iran's theocratic government they still possessed different points of view about how that experience had come to be and what it meant. Reading Ms. Nafisi's recounting of her seminars is as pleasurable as quietly sitting in a room and listening to a conversation between very intelligent people. One comes away from this book not only with a new understanding of familiar texts but also with a deep appreciation for the fact that, at least for now, we do not live in a militant theocracy in which librarians and book sellers are forced to secretly inform the ruling regime what their citizens are reading. If for some reason this situation changes, then literature, as Ms. Nafisi demonstrates is an extremely powerful tool of survival and of resistance.
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Summary: A COMPLETE LIE!!! SHAME ON YOU MS. NAFISI! SHAME ON YOU!!
Review: PLEASE BE AWARE! THIS BOOK IS A COMPLETE LIE! O.K. Ms. Nafisi, I'm directly talking to you! How could you write such big fat lies? As an Iranian girl who has gone to the same University that you gathered your students from and have sat on those same seats, in the same classrooms, I had my eyes wide opened with great surprise when I read your book! Who says that the books you have named are banned in Iran??!! How come I was taught them in VERY GREAT DETAIL in that SAME UNIVERSITY?? Be honest with yourself! Was "Pride and Prejudice" banned?? How come I had it as a textbook in my "literature 1" class?? And even took a very hard test on it as my final exam?? Do you want me to name the Professor for you? I'm sure you would know the person!! This is just one example!
One thing that did spark my curiosity was that you have mentioned that having curtains is a "must" in Iran! I don't remember ever having anyone told me that I cannot leave my window without a curtain! In any case, any human being would have a curtain on their window! Especially if you don't want to be seen by the people outside, when changing your clothes!
Can I ask you a question?? Why are you making things much much bigger than they really are in Iran?? What's your goal? Maybe you are in cooperation with the U.S media! Causing all these false stereotypes is not really nice, and is very misleading!! Dear Readers,
As an Iranian girl, living both in Iran and the U.S. I would like to ask you to do more research before judging about a country that you have never been to. Iran is a great country that is improving day by day, and has done a great deal. Just wearing a veil doesn't mean that women are treated lower than men. NO! Ms. Nafisi's problem was the veil that she had to wear, AND also the problems she and her family had during the revolution, so she has chosen to make up for the difficulties this way, by giving out inaccurate information about the present regime. When reading this book, just keep in mind that it's ONE HUNDRED PERCENT LIE!
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Summary: loved this!
Review: I absolutely loved this book. In the US, it's difficult to get unbiased information about daily life in Iran. This book delved into the history, and showed both the daily inequities, but also the strength and determination, of its citizens, especially the women. It reminded me that there was a time when Iranian women were on equal status with men, and the historical events that changed that, from one person's perspective. It discusses day to day life, the Iran-Iraq war, and things the women would do to rebel against their situation. These women were intelligent, educated, and had a desire to learn. The author also intersperses her historical discussions, with literary criticisms. The book club members take fiction, and see things that Western readers likely wouldn't, to apply it to their own lives, and gain hope from it. When I first started this book, I thought it would catapult into my "top 5 ever" list. I still give it 5 stars, but the one part I disliked, was the digression into the past. I would have liked to have heard more about the book club members, and their lives. The way the book is structured, the first quarter, and the last quarter of the book discuss the club, with the middle being about the author. She also moves in and out of time often, and it can be hard to figure out what time period she is discussing. I hope that you will read this book. It's truly a phenomenal narrative, and one that all Western readers should read to better understand a country that's been propagandized for years.
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Summary: Brave Women
Review: This is such a great book. I read it in two days and I could not put it down. I shows how these great works of fiction can help people can help though even difficult times.
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