The title itself is a rather catchy one, however, I must add that it is an important book. There are so many aspects of this memoir that I value a lot.

For me it is less about totalitarian Regimes and Iran, it is more about courage and integrity in times of crisis particularly when one is not allowed to do something as harmless as reading, and therefore one stands up against the bullies. When I read this book, I l felt like I were in a literature class with Ms. Nafisi her students. Reading forbidden books, discussing writers and then using imaginations to combat the world around; or shall I say, one reads to remain sane inside and not let any regressive forces break the human will and intelligence, and that's what these Iranians do.

Very often such narratives are often understood or read in regard to one set of people, one country, one people, the moment we fall in such a trap the very purpose of the book is defeated. The critique in the book is the critique of power, how freedoms are curtailed if one does not pay attention when we ignore and look away. While it is most definitely a book about Iran, but it should not only be read as a portrayal of regressive Iran and the superior west. I guess writers like Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Lawrence are read and claimed in Iran or in other countries for the same reasons they are read in the west. When these writers are banned and their books are burnt in Iran, it is exactly for the same reasons these same writers were once banned in the west.

Of course, one feels quite suffocated when one reads the kind of restrictions that are imposed, particularly, on women in Iran. As a reader, I was aghast to read that women have to be in 'hijab' even in a classroom. But the book also tells that it is the new regime that has imposed these laws, Iran before the revolution has been radically different.

Looking at the contemporary world, it seems absurd now that Muslim women are now policed and shamed in the same way, but for different reasons, not only in Iran but also in the most advanced nations of the world. Personally, I think that the whole politics of 'Hijab' whether of the Mullahs or the Trumpists mirror each other.

I am sure someone like Ms. Nafisi who wrote such an exemplary book concerning the situation in Iran in the days of revolution must have now, being a US resident, a lot to do in the US.

Era da un po’ di mesi che una vocina nascosta nelle profondità del mio cervello mi suggeriva di leggere questo libro. Un po’ intimorita dalla densità, a livello di contenuti e sentimenti, che mi aspettavo, ho atteso arrivasse il momento opportuno e la predisposizione giusta da parte mia.

È indubbio che questo libro non sia la classica storia di chi, visti gli eventi che si sono succeduti in maniera irrefrenabile e imprevedibile, decide di lasciare a malincuore il proprio paese, in cerca di un luogo in cui la paura, l’angoscia, non siano all’ordine del giorno. È, più che altro, un grande panegirico della letteratura, di quelle opere che ci mostrano personaggi che hanno tutto fuorché tratti eroici, che spiccano per la loro imperfezione, i loro difetti e le loro contraddizioni, ma non se ne vergognano. Sono opere che non hanno la pretesa d’insegnarci qualcosa, di imporci un modello di vita cui adeguarci o da cui discostarci il più possibile.
Semmai, offrono una chiave di lettura per la realtà, la nostra micro-realtà che affrontiamo nella sfera quotidiana, per quanto essa sia lontana da ciò che si legge in quelle righe; regalano un punto di vista, sì, ma soprattutto, per riprendere le parole di Nafisi, “il diritto all’immaginazione”, quel diritto che ci fa apprezzare il fatto tutt’altro che banale d’essere ancora vivi e che ci ricorda che non dobbiamo ristagnare nel nostro vissuto, ma auspicare di continuo un cambiamento e fare in modo che esso prenda forma, a partire dalla nostra mente.

Pertanto, prendete questo libro e gustatevi ogni singola, preziosa parola.

Azar Nafisi can write elegant prose,but the pace is very slow.There is not enough meat in the story.

The book could have done with a fair bit of trimming. Has a few tense moments with recollections about the violence during the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war.

Generally boring,however.I couldn't really care if those women were reading controversial Lolita,in conservative Tehran.

"Uplynul celý rok, než jsem se znovu vrátila k myšlence napsání této knihy, a další, než jsem se odhodlala chopit pera, jak se říká, a začít psát o Austenové a Nabokovovi a těch, které jejich díla četly a společně se mnou prožívaly.

Táto kniha zrejme nebude pre každého, nie je to totiž klasická beletria. Ako hovorí podnázov, ide o knihy a spomienky. Doslova a dopísmena. Kniha ležala dlhé roky a čala na svoj čítací čas, ktorý dozrel a prišiel a nastalo očarenie, ktoré som ani nečakala.

Je rozdelená na viaceré časti, v ktorých sa venuje rôznym autorom a dielam, no nie je to kniha iba o literatúre. Profesorka literatúry fascinujúcim spôsobom ukazuje ako sa úzko je prepojený život skutočný a ten v knihách, dokonca aj tých klasických. Prináša zaujímavé pohľady na niektoré romány, ktoré dodnes v čitateľoch vzbudzujú rozpaky, medzi inými aj na Lolitu. Takto nejako som si vždy prestavovala učenie literatúry.

Irán v rokoch 80-90, opisované situácie a udalosti v spoločnosti, ktoré si len sotva vieme predstaviť a pochopiť, spomienky na svoje žiačky a svojich priateľov (skutočné mená môže uvádzať iba pri tých,ktorí sú po smrti!), ktorí jej hlboko uviazli v srdci a ktorí si našli cestu ku knihách aj v ťažkých časoch a dokonca ovplyvnili ich budúcnosť. Autorka hovorí, že hádanie sa so študentmi kvôli spisovateľom patrí k jej najkrajším spomienkam, akoby to ich písanie predstavovalo otázku života a smrti.

Nejde o strhujúci príbeh, ani sa tak nečíta, veľa som premýšľala nad jednotlivými stranami. Osvedčilo sa mi dávkovanie 20-30 strán :) Nie som teda žiadny plačko, ale táto kniha mi dala zabrať :)

"Žili jsme ve společnosti, která popírala, že by literární díla mohla mít nějakou hodnotu, a uznávala je jen jako služky čehosi naléhavějšího - zejména ideologie. V naší zemi se všechno, i ty nejsoukromnější činy a gesta, vykládalo politicky. Barva mého šátku nebo otcovy kravaty byla symbolem západní dekadence a imperialistických sklonů. Mužská tvář bez vousů, vzájemné podání ruky mezi příslušníkmi opačného pohlaví, potlesk nebo pískání na veřejných shromážděních, to všechno bylo označováno za napodobování Západu a tudíž dekadentní, součást imperialistického spiknutí s cílem svrhnout naši civilizaci a kulturu."

"Islámská republika nás uvrhla zpátky do časů Jane Austenové. Buďtež požehnána předem domluvená manželství! Dnes se dívky vdávají buď proto, že je k tomu donutí příbuzní, nebo aby získaly zelenou kartu, případně finanční zabezpečení, anebo kvůli sexu - lidé uzavírají sňatky z nejrůznejších důvodů, ale jen zřídka z lásky."

"Byly jsme nešťastné. Srovnávaly jsme svou situaci a své schopnosti s tím, čo všechno bychom mohly mít, a nijak nás neutěšovalo, že miliony jiných jsou na tom ještě hůr než my. Proč bychom měly být šťastnější nebo spokojnější při pomyšlení, že někdo jiný je nešťastný?"

“What we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”

This book isn’t a fast read. I’ve started reading this memoir 24 October, and I only finished part 1 so far -77 pages of 347- and that already took me a while! Maybe I’m in a reading slump, but I doubt that, because I’m eager enough to read. Some other reviewers complained that the book is tedious, disjointed and all over the place, and that the author’s tone is smug and self-important. Except from the fact that when the author refers to the girls who come to her private reading class, she always talks about ‘My girls’, which for some reason I find irritating, I’m not sure yet if I share these criticisms. For me, it’s just such a book that’s interesting enough, but not really absorbing, so I just plough on through it, in search of those ’epiphanies of truth’ in Western literature for Iranian veiled women.
I haven’t read any of the novels that are being discussed in this book, but I don’t consider this to be an obstacle for being able to understand the references to these well-known works. Even so, someone who read those classics, will probably benefit from it while reading this book.
(5 November 2018).

Part I - Lolita

“Yet I suppose that if I were to go against my own recommendation and choose a work of fiction that would most resonate with our lives in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it would not be The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or even 1984 but perhaps Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading or better yet, Lolita.”

“What Nabokov creates for us in Invitation to a Beheading is not the actual pain and torture of a totalitarian regime but the nightmarish quality of living in an atmosphere of perpetual dread. ...
Unlike in other utopian novels, the forces of evil here are not omnipotent ; Nabokov shows us their frailty as well. They are ridiculous and they can be defeated, and this does not lessen the tragedy—the waste. Invitation to a Beheading is written from the point of view of the victim, one who ultimately sees the absurd sham of his persecutors and who must retreat into himself in order to survive.
Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the cruelty to which we were subjected. We had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive. We also instinctively recognized poshlust—not just in others, but in ourselves. This was one reason that art and literature became so essential to our lives : they were not a luxury but a necessity. What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner.”

“In most of Nabokov’s novels—Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Ada, Pnin—there was always the shadow of another world, one that was only attainable through fiction. It is this world that prevents his heroes and heroines from utter despair, that becomes their refuge in a life that is constantly brutal.
Take Lolita. This was the story of a twelve-year-old girl who had nowhere to go. Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy , into his dead love, and he had destroyed her. The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another. We don’t know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel, the finished work, is hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life, ordinary everyday life, all the normal pleasures that Lolita, like Yassi, was deprived of.
... in fact Nabokov had taken revenge against our own solipsizers ; he had taken revenge on the Ayatollah Khomeini, on Yassi’s last suitor, on the dough-faced teacher for that matter. They had tried to shape others according to their own dreams and desires, but Nabokov, through his portrayal of Humbert, had exposed all solipsists who take over other people’s lives.”

“At some point, the truth of Iran’s past became as immaterial to those who appropriated it as the truth of Lolita’s is to Humbert. It became immaterial in the same way that Lolita’s truth, her desires and life, must lose color before Humbert’s one obsession, his desire to turn a twelve-year-old unruly child into his mistress.
When I think of Lolita, I think of that half-alive butterfly pinned to the wall. The butterfly is not an obvious symbol, but it does suggest that Humbert fixes Lolita in the same manner that the butterfly is fixed ; he wants her, a living breathing human being, to become stationary, to give up her life for the still life he offers her in return. Lolita’s image is forever associated in the minds of her readers with that of her jailer. Lolita on her own has no meaning ; she can only come to life through her prison bars.
This is how I read Lolita. Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students’ hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.”

“Like the best defense attorneys, who dazzle with their rhetoric and appeal to our higher sense of morality, Humbert exonerates himself by implicating his victim—a method we were quite familiar with in the Islamic Republic of Iran. (“We are not against cinema,” Ayatollah Khomeini had declared as his henchmen set fire to the movie houses, “we are against prostitution!”)

“Again we skipped back and forth between our lives and novels: was it surprising that we so appreciated Invitation to a Beheading? We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us. Was this the rule of Islam? What memories were we creating for our children? This constant assault, this persistent lack of kindness, was what frightened me most.”

“I had asked my students if they remember the dance scene in Invitation to a Beheading: the jailer invites Cincinnatus to a dance. They begin a waltz and move out into the hall. In a corner they run into a guard: “They described a circle near him and glided back into the cell, and now Cincinnatus regretted that the swoon’s friendly embrace had been so brief.” This movement in circles is the main movement of the novel. As long as he accepts the sham world the jailers impose upon him, Cincinnatus will remain their prisoner and will move within the circles of their creation. The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality. My students witnessed it in show trials on television and enacted it every time they went out into the streets dressed as they were told to dress. They had not become part of the crowd who watched the executions, but they did not have the power to protest them, either.
The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other. That is why, in their world, rituals—empty rituals —become so central. There was not much difference between our jailers and Cincinnatus’s executioners. They invaded all private spaces and tried to shape every gesture, to force us to become one of them, and that in itself was another form of execution.”

I read this book while I was down with the flu, which added a dimention to my reading as I was isolated in my room for a couple of days. I read some of the reviews for this book on Good Reads and I must say my experience of this book is quite different from what some other people have reported. Azar's opening two chapters were enough to suck me into her world and engross me. Her reading of Lolita was wonderful and I like the way she able to bring her reading of this book, her reflections on Humbolt into the context of her own experiences in Tehran. One of the criticisms of this book that I read on Good Reads is that her reading material is too western centric - i.e. that she gives too much praise to the literature of America and therefore might give the American reader the impression that their lit is 'better' than Islamic or Iranian literature. I didn't read her book choices in this way. In a way, because America became such a central focus of hatred for the regime in Iran during the revolution she picked this material to demonstrate how biased and myopic this focus was, and how it failed to see the complexity of American life - i.e. that books like Lolita or the Great Gatsby were not recieved with one interpretation in America and that many of the criticisms leveled at those books in the Iranian context were also been discussed in America - i.e. that they were immoral or had flawed heros.

She talks quite considerably about the difficulty of becoming as she calls it 'irrelevant' in her own country. She describes the constant scrutiny that women get on the streets if they are seen to be too alluring or if they wear 'pink socks' or let their nails grow or have a strand of hair fall out from under her head covering. I was thinking of this in the light of my own 'Australian' context. Obviously my life is not as restricted in terms of what I wear or how I choose to adorn or comport myself in public. In fact, these choices are fairly banal and mundane. Yet, for Azar this restriction caused her to examine aspects of herself and her society to work out what really mattered. Because the system made socks important, choosing to wear pink or striped socks became a subversive act. Beyond the immediate existential questions of how an individual is able to deal with having their public and private lives so micro managed, I also enjoyed her questioning of the effects of these policies on society as a whole and especially her understanding of the role of literature in allowing a person to understand complexity in life as a whole.

I must say, when I read her passage about the 'trial' of the novel 'the great Gatsby' in her class, I experienced a different book than I had read. She managed to inject me with a wonderful sense of excitement and a desire to reread Gatsby with new eyes.

This was an amazing but very painful to read because of topics like the treatment of women in Iran.

The pace goes quickly but it a disturbing account of daily life under the Iran’s religious leaders.

It is probably a book most people should read to increase their understanding of Iran.

I highly recommend.

This was a tough read. I suppose I would have appreciated it more if I had read all the books that were referenced in this one. And if I studied literature, studied the meaning of every scene, every characterization, every image from the books, I might have appreciated it.

Unfortunately this was much too deep and a serious study of literature. I enjoyed her accounts of life in Tehran and the characters in her book. I enjoyed her personal accounts and her life stories. Unfortunately true life was weaved into the fiction from novels i've never read, so I couldn't appreciate her insights and found her writing high-brow and much too seriously intellectual for me to read it without zoning out every so often.

The middle parts of the book go into depth about her background and her life experiences which I found the most interesting. The beginning and end delve far too much into the literary world. I suppose if you're a serious student of literature this book is a gold. But me being a casual reader, it was hard to swallow.

الرواية قراءة للواقع الإيراني بعد الثورة على نظام الشاه ، تلك الثورة التي أوصلت التيار الإسلامي للحكم ونتج عن هذا عدد كبير من القوانين التي تقيد حرية الأفراد والجماعات وتقمع الإبداع والحريات والحقوق لكثير من الإيرانيين وكان أكثر المتضررين من هذه القوانين النساء والفتيات ، تناقش نفيسي في هذه الرواية معضلة الحرية والثقافة والوطن والخيال من خلال صف دراسي منزلي صغير لها مع بعض طالباتها الجامعيات ومن خلال استعراض مسيرة ثمانية عشرة عام من الحياة داخل هذه الجمهورية التي يحكمها الملالي والمتشددون ، استخدمت نفيسي قراءاتها لعدد من الروايات في اسقاط بعض الأفكار والنقد الأدبي الحديث على الواقع اليومي لها ولأسرتها وطالباتها وجامعتها ،، الرواية جيدة وتحتوي على نقد متميز لأنظمة الحكم الشمولية وخاصة تلك التي تنطلق من منطلق آيدولوجي بحت

In case you don't know about this book yet (though, honestly, how could you not know about this book yet?), it is an absolutely amazing memoir by an Iranian woman who was a professor of English & Persian literature at the University of Tehran before, during, and after the revolution and war with Iraq. Once wearing the veil became mandatory and she refused to wear one, she was forced to quit teaching, and one way she came up with to fill her time was to gather several of her most dedicated students for a once-weekly literature class. In it, they discussed books like The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Lolita (duh), etc.

This book is triple-layered. The first layer is Nafisi's memoir of the tumultuous times she lived in in Tehran, which she watched go from one of the most progressive, intellectual cities in the world to one of the most restrictive and repressive. You can see many of her friends and relatives here, and learn about the different ways people dealt with everything -- from withdrawing completely from society to picking sides and becoming more vocal and fervent about religion, politics, nationalism, etc.

The second layer is Nafisi's memoirs of being a professor of literature in such times, including one astonishing episode where her class actually puts The Great Gatsby on trial to determine whether it is decadent, Western poison or a work of high art. Not to mention the memories of the women in her literature class, how they coped with the readings, one another, and their lives in Iran.

The third layer, which for me catapults this book into a work of absolute genius, is Nafisi's theories on and explications of the books themselves, including how they relate to the struggles and culture of both of the above layers. Nafisi's brilliant theories about literature, her clear, inviting voice, and the much-needed internal perspective she gives us (Americans) on a country and culture that we are essentially taught to loathe all combine to make this one of the most incredible books I've ever read. Three times.

A good book about the power of books and reading, particularly for women in countries where that is not often encouraged. I feel like I read this sometime in grad school but before I started keeping track. I still haven't read Lolita.

Leer Lolita en Teherán es, en el acto y en el título, una abierta manifestación de la libertad de la imaginación frente a las prohibiciones, políticas o de cualquier índole. También podría haberse llamado Leer Gatsby, o James, o incluso Austen, que son las partes en que se divide el libro (podría agregarse a Saúl Bellow).
Nafisi, es profesora de Literatura, y luego de su abandono de la Universidad, dictó durante dos años un taller para un grupo de jóvenes. El taller, y el libro dialogan con las obras literarias, y con la historia y actualidad de Irán.
"Cuando escriba todo esto, quizás me vuelva más generosa, menos enfadada".
Este es un libro que Azar Nafisi necesitaba escribir. ¿Pero tiene sentido leerlo? Es un libro escrito con gran calidad literaria, y personalmente, me permitió tener algunas nuevas perspectivas sobre la literatura, y una versión más serena (menos épica) de la realidad de Irán. Por momentos se me hizo un poco tedioso, aunque el final es meritorio: me hizo sentir más generoso, menos enfadado.