Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

Book Summary:

The inspirational tale of eight women who defied the confines of life in revolutionary Iran through the joy and power of literature.

‘That room for all of us, became a place of transgression. What a wonderland it was! Sitting around the large coffee table covered with bouquets of flowers…We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.’

For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Azar Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. Shy and uncomfortable at first, they soon began to open up and speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading – ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Washington Square’, ‘Daisy Miller’ and ‘Lolita’ – their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum.

Azar Nafisi's luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a Used glimpse, from the inside, of women's lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice.

About the Author –

 Born in Tehran in 1948, Azar Nafisi studied in England and Switzerland before earning a Ph.D. in English and American literature at the University of Oklahoma . She returned to teach at the University of Tehran, but after refusing to wear the mandatory veil in 1981, she was expelled. She later taught at Allameh Tabatabai University until resigning in 1995, then began her secret Western-literature seminars .

In 1997, Nafisi emigrated to the U.S. and became a citizen in 2008 . She served as a fellow and professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, Oxford University, and Georgetown, and continues writing essays and books. Her debut memoir spent an astounding 117 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into 32 languages, earning major international awards .

Beyond Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi has authored Things I’ve Been Silent About, The Republic of Imagination, That Other World, and Read Dangerously, focusing on literature’s power in authoritarian contexts and the personal cost of exile