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| Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books | 
 enlarge | Author: Azar Nafisi
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  354 reviews
Sales Rank: 2320
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 1
ISBN: 081297106X
Dewey Decimal Number: 820.9
EAN: 9780812971064
ASIN: 081297106X
Publication Date: December 30, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Amazon.com
An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people's lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color." Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of "morality guards," the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became "essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity," she writes. Threaded into the memoir are trenchant discussions of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors who provided the women with examples of those who successfully asserted their autonomy despite great odds. The great works encouraged them to strike out against authoritarianism and repression in their own ways, both large and small: "There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom," she writes. In short, the art helped them to survive. --Shawn Carkonen
Product Description
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 349 more reviews...
 A delightful surprise August 9, 2008
It took forever for me to start this book because I didn't think I would like it. However, It was extremely well-written...I thought that the weaving of the history of Tehran with the story of the girls/women in the book club with the review of the books (the great gatsby, Lolita, and Daisy Miller) was done so seemingly effortlessly. I felt like I was learning so much about all three topics and was fascinated by each.
When I read this book, I was going through a very tough time at work...undergoing alot of institutional injustice. This was the perfect book to read during that trying time...I think it helped me to see that people can live inside of a world of injustice and ridiculous, illogical rules and still find art and beauty and love and friendship and that in some ways these things are cultivated more fully by repression and tragedy.
 Breathe It In August 8, 2008
Reading Lolita in Tehran is one of the most beautifully written books I have read. Full of lines such as "Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms."
Another one I liked is: "A novel is not an allegory... It is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter the world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is the heart of a novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing."
She uses this logic with her own writing, drawing you in to revolutionary Iran. Deftly comparing and contrasting nightmarish, totalitarian scenes of the Islamic Republic's `morality guards' that feel like something straight out of 1984 with scenes and analysis from novels as diverse as Lolita and The Great Gatsby.
A very enjoyable and one of a kind book.
 Shouldn't be read in Tehran... or anywhere else August 6, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Why should you avoid reading this memoir at all costs? Because it is incredibly poorly written, repetitive, condescending, obvious and yet obtuse, and one of the worst literary offenses I've had the misfortune of encountering.
The author cannot decide if she wants to focus on her love of books, or her time in Tehran, and while I good writer would manage to blend these two concepts together in a thoughtful way, Nafisi chooses to just jerkily jump back and forth between the two topics, so that neither "story" gets to develop very much. The ties between the two are heavy-handed and artless, by which I mean that the author will explicitly explain how Nabokov or Lolita represented her situation in Iran, rather than crafting these ideas and allowing the reader to draw these parallels on his or her own. She firmly sticks to telling rather than showing, which makes for a pedantic and frustrating read. Chapters are arbitrarily demarcated, and the same thoughts and ideas pervade each one. Of course, the author is so discursive in her writing that were it not for this repetition, one might have no idea what was going on at all. The author, in her bid to be poetic and "deep", manages to sacrifice lucidity and meaning. She frequently peppers her writing with paragraphs replete with sentences that sound nice, but don't actually mean anything or logically follow the idea she's thus far been conveying. For an English professor, she writes like a 10th grader, and seems to have committed the cardinal sin of NOT having drawn up an outline before hand, leaving her writing a jumbled, opaque mess. Plus, when it comes to literature, she's as bad as the ayatollah she condemns, as she presents all of her opinions and interpretations of the works as though they were fact and the only way to correctly read the texts in question. A little acknowledgment that her own personal experiences may be coloring her views would have tempered some of her more grandiose claims, and would have introduced some subtlety and self-awareness that this book ultimately lacks but desperately needs. I would have loathed to take a class with her!
The structure of the narrative (such that it is) is poor, the narrator herself is frustrating, and the ideas are simplistic and obvious. Often times the writing comes off as "twee" and overly quaint (e.g., referring to one of her acquaintances as "her magician"; calling the members of her book group "her girls" even though some of them were married women with children of their own...). Perhaps some degree of excessive sentimentality is excusable in a memoir, but here it's just reproachable because the whole novel feels incredibly inauthentic. Nafisi cloaks her story in her overwraught writing, akin to the hijabs and chadors the women in her story must wear, rather than letting anything true shine through. It all rings false and fails to deliver anything of value, and it also completely failed to connect with this reader.
Overall, this is a badly written book that fails spectacularly. It just goes to show that just because you love books, that doesn't mean you should go ahead and write one. I made it to page 70 before the repetition and poor writing finally got the best of me. Save yourself the headache and just read Lolita instead, wherever you are.
One of the best books I've read in a while July 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Fantastic book, not only does she give u a real insight into her experiences during a key period in Iranian history but also serves as a quasi course on English literature...yet remains fluid, wholly engaging and easy to read!
Great history, memoir and lit lesson July 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Azar Nafisi was the right person (an intellectual and writer) who was in the right place (Tehran University) at the wrong time (The Iranian Revolution). Having lived in both America and in Iran, she was in unusual position of teaching American Literature at a time in Iranian history when America was demonized as the Great Satan. In soft and exquisitely-recalled detail, she describes her professional struggle to keep her class interested in Western works like Nabokov's "Lolita" and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." Her struggle was to remain true to the meaning of the texts at a time when even leftist and secular students saw these works as evidence of Western decadence. Her personal struggles are also detailed, notably her attempts to remain free of the veil at a time when armed thugs and armed government morality squads roamed the streets.
Nafisi's eventual departure from the university prompts her to hold class in her own home for interested students, mostly women. These students come from all over the political and religious spectrum, but are united in their love of literature. Nafisi and her students find themselves drawn into a relationship that touches on their personal lives, proving again the transformative power of literature in even the least hospital climates.
The voice of Nafisi is quiet, deliberate, thoughtful, lyrical and courageous. More headstrong as a young woman, her defiance of government oppression and terror is more measured, but no less strong. But "Reading Lolita in Tehran" is far more than a memoir one woman's experience under a brutal regime. As she details the conversations and arguments that break out inside her classroom, we become more than spectators. We too are in attendance and begin to appreciate the depths that her favorite authors -- Austen, James, Nabokov, Twain and Fitzgerald -- are able to plumb in their novels. Nafisi's skill in drilling down to the bedrock values of these stories, even to the point of finding commonalities between the American novels and the Iranian experience, is surprising and seems all but inevitable.
In spite of its length, I found this book very engaging. The occasional scholarly reflections were often staged as lively discussions among characters, even a scene in which a book was put on trial. A wonderful read for those who love literature and who would like a peek into the darkest years of the Khomeini-led Iranian revolution.
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