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. Continue reading »