A belated cheer for Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi’s book combines memoir with an intimate account of reading for survival in the Mullahs’ Iran. Nafisi is an academic specialising in fiction. She believes passionately in ‘art as a human complication’ (James’s phrase). Complication as we encounter it in the best Western fiction is always intolerable to the orthodox. Some of us have lived through this conflict – in very comfortable circumstances – in respect to the absolutism of the Left, and later of the women’s movement (Ti-Grace Atkinson’s ‘burn all the books’).
Nafisi describes how, in a class discussion of Daisy Miller, one Islamist declares simply: Daisy is immoral and ought to be killed. In this milieu, ambiguity and irony become heretical, to suspend judgment immoral, to doubt, a crime.
Nafisi teaches out of commitment to those values and is sacked because of them. Before finally leaving Iran she retreats into private life where she reads to sustain herself, then forms a small group of gifted former students, a cell of freedom.
It’s a humbling experience to read this book. It makes me angry to remember Frederic Jamison’s (representative) claim that there is no space outside ideology. Stand on Mars and that might be a passable remark. Here there is still a distinction to be made between Popper’s ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies, here we need to remember how the Left in Iran joined forces with the mullahs to oust the liberals and the liberal Shiite clerics. Here on earth there is a choice to be made between a society in which books, films and TV can provide a ‘human complication’ and a society which tries to derive totalising laws from dumb faith.
The question of the fucked chicken, for example. The Ayatollah approved of chicken-fucking as a sexual outlet for single men. He was then asked whether such a chicken could be eaten.
The best review I’ve found online is Hannes Stein’s for Die Welt (in German). The Anglosphere publisher sees fit to quote Geraldine Brooks on the front cover of the paperback.
Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book.
Open societies have their own problems.