divine angst

I’m just going to say one thing about Beauty and the Geek.

Chuck, the “doctor,” is an arrogant, pompous jackass. He is pissing me off.

That is all.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

I picked this book up because so many people I know have read it and enjoyed it. I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew it wasn’t a novel, but I thought it might be written like a novel, and it’s not. Rather, it’s a personal history, a memoir, a diary almost, woven through with literary analysis.

Azar Nafisi was a professor of English Literature in Tehran at the time of the Iranian Revolution. She was eventually expelled from teaching and began a private class, in her home, with a hand-picked group of her female students. This book follows the class, but it also follows the paths Nafisi and many of her students took to get to her living room on Thursdays. Like the class itself, the book begins with a great deal of straightforward literary discussion but gradually, over time, becomes more layered—the literature and their reactions to the works begin overlay their lives and the political climate they live in.

Those phrases sound cold, don’t they? “Literary analysis.” “Literary discussion.” Unfortunate, because much of the story follows Nafisi trying to show her students the life in literature, literature that they have little context for. How can you teach Gatsby, with all its contradictions and it’s bald American-ness, to students living under a regime that decries anything Western as decadent and evil? [Ed.’s note: By the way, if you haven’t read The Great Gatsby, be warned that Nafisi gives away the ending.]

One thing I wished as I read through Nafisi’s story is that I had read more of the works she teaches. I have read no Nabokov or James. I have read Gatsby and Austen though, and I felt I absorbed more in the sections so named. I’ll also say that, because I was so young when the revolution in Iran occured, I didn’t know much of the actual history that unfolds as Nafisi’s story unfolds. I think I’m glad I didn’t have that perspective, that bias, from remembering the news stories and the Western reaction.

At any rate, I enjoyed this book, even as I struggled with it. The form itself is out of my comfort zone, as was the content. I am a pragmatist and at times fought with Nafisi’s principled stands—refusing to wear the veil, for instance. (I cheered inwardly when a colleague convinced her to give in so that she could continue doing what she loved, teaching.) Of course I see the danger in the incremental sacrifice of rights—one day, you wake up and discover you have no freedoms left!—but that practical devil on my shoulder pushes for the “greater good.”

So, I recommend. I’m glad I read it. Not everyone would enjoy this book, but I think most people would take something important away from it.