Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir by Azar Nafisi who taught in the Islamic Republic of Iran during the Iranian revolution.
The book narrates her experiences while teaching at the University of Tehran after 1979, and the consequences on her refusal to wear the veil.
Amid strict censorship and the morality squads roaming in the streets of Iran, Nafisi and her students risk everything to read the forbidden Western classics and discuss prominent writers such as Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.
The classes, meant to escape from the reality of Iran’s totalitarian theocracy. In the course of the readings Nafisi and her students realize that their personal lives are intertwined with the ones they were reading.
For Nafisi, the veil stood for the surrender of women’s identity under a tyrannical regime that used fear and intimidation to control codes of dressing and behavior both in the private and public and, in her words make women “irrelevant.”
Through the discussion of Henry James, Fitzgerald and Nabokov, Nafisi lashes out against the entrenched authoritarianism and repression that seeped inside Iran after the Islamic revolution. She uses her memoir to delve deep inside the consciousness and culture of Iran that the reader would never forget.
Nafisi’s memoir is a fascinating narration of disillusionment and hope in a theocracy where women continue to contest the patriarchal hegemony. While the conservative regime ensures that the women remain invisible and powerless, Nafisi through her narration succeeds in making women’s presence visible and more powerful.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is a serious reflection about the ravages of theocracy pitted against the ordeals of women’s freedom.
The book is a testimony to the expansion of consciousness that happens when individuals use literature to understand the complexities inherent in societies and, in the process discover unknown sides of their character.
