Just when the Police were winning a Grammy with a song that included the allusive line `just like the old man in that book by Nabakov’, it was a crime to read Lolita in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Azar Nafisi’s spendidly-titled book chronicles one woman’s experience of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s long descent into decadent darkness.
Through the lens of Nabokov’s Lolita, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the writings of Henry James and Jane Austen, and an idiosyncratic clutch of other works, Nafisi and her students interpret their lives as women whom their Islamicist countrymen would rather not acknowledge. First in university classrooms and then at weekly clandestine gatherings in Nafisi’s apartment, she and `my girls’ discuss the indignities, the illegal rage, and the inevitable accomodations with the regime that characterize the life under theocracy of those who have learned to think critically and, so, to bear the `burden of freedom’.
This is sumptuous and sensuous writing. Nafisi ends a chapter as few writers can, leaving one breathless with engaged attention.
She knows as only the disillusioned radical can that the realization of a dream can prove a very bad thing indeed. `Be careful what you hope for’, she has learned to warn her girls and her readers. At those odd moments when neither circumstances nor ideological humility impede the fulfillment of euphoric wishes, people are capable of creating hell on earth by getting what they have dreampt. The Islamic Republic is the nightmarish consequence of such a moment.
Her book is filled with memorable characters that fill the mind’s eye with a tone of voice, the curve of a cheek, the way one places himself always upon a couch and turns to listen. Nafisi’s evocative recountings give one the illusion of knowing these human beings, otherwise distant and anonymous to readers in the West who would without Nafisi remain senseless to these dignified lives, lived in an almost airless space. Each of her girls becomes familiar in this way: Mitra … Sanaz … Nassrin … Azin. The endlessly accomodating Mrs. Rezvan gives a face and a voice to every decent person who adjusts to the ceaseless parade of small insanities that tyranny foists upon people who in a better time would do the right thing most of the time. The blind censor seems a satirical overshooting until one realizes that Nafisi is deadly serious and this caricature all too real. `My magician’ stands out as the unnamed secular sage through whose common sense Nafisi discovers her own mind. So, one is shocked yet somehow not entirely surprised when, near the end, Nafisi questions herself about her interlocutor in this way:
‘Since I left Iran, respecting his wishes, I have not talked or written to my magician, but his magic has been so much a part of my life that sometimes I ask myself, Was he ever real? Did I invent him? Did he invent me?’
But that is giving away the end of Nafisi’s tale, or at least the end of what she has told us thus far. Her eventual departure from the Islamic Republic is foreshadowed by her stunning description of the day she `became irrelevant’.
For anyone who has ever doubted that `great books’ possess the power to interpret events and epochs, this book is a suitable antidote. Like a cloister of monks keeping the candle of learning alive in a Dark Age’s cave, Nafisi, her magician, and her girls discover in the imagination of enduring words a point of reference that at the same time critiques the theocracy’s dank oppression and allows its captors to remain something more than victims.
Nafisi’s narrative from time to time flirts with self-absorption, each time escaping by way of the moral authority that comes from small decisions of non-conformity and the humble graces that preserve humanity against a regime that would asphyxiate it in God’s name. This flirtation is a mere pecadillo when read against the atrocities and mindless denial that form its backdrop, and we might not have this book were it not for the author’s inward turning and descriptive prowess. Her description of a sensuous Persian dance is breathtaking; it is even more awesome that such appreciation could survive the Republic’s monotonous denial of all that enlivens the senses.
By writing Reading Lolita, Nafisi has clung to something that might rather have been stripped from her hand. Let us call it `created human imagination’, that capacity to stand against official denial of human longing for freedom and the opportunity to create a life of one’s own choosing.
The audio version of this book is read by South African-born Lisette Lecat, the narrative voice of a decade, perhaps even of a generation.
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