Nafisi, A. (2004). Reading Lolita in Tehran: A memoir in books. New York: Random House Books.

Hilal Nakiboglu

In her latest book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi offers readers rich, often disturbing glimpses into life in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Although Nafisi tells us Reading Lolita is to be read as a memoir, the book is much more than a personal account of her years in Iran. It is, at times and alternatively, a work of literary, social, and cultural criticism. It is a book that, rather successfully, attempts to excavate and describe moments in the modern history of a nation too-often misunderstood.

Nafisi, the daughter of a former mayor of Tehran and a Parliamentarian mother, remembers a childhood of considerable class privilege and comfort. Having been educated in Switzerland, England, and the United States as a young woman, she returns to the Iran of her youth to find it nearly unrecognizable: restless, boiling, and on the brink of revolution. There, as a professor of English literature - initially at the University of Tehran, then the Free Islamic and Allameh Tabatabai universities - she teaches the texts of Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Doing so is understood to be a clear act of defiance against the rigid ideologies of a nascent republic.

Nafisi eventually withdraws from university life; she resigns but ultimately decides to continue teaching in the clandestine sanctuary of her living room. Inviting seven of her most dedicated and promising students, she forms a book club where the participants-all young women - meet to share thoughts not only literary in nature, but those acutely personal as well. "For those precious few hours," she writes, "we felt free to discuss our pains and joys…for that suspended time we abdicated our responsibilities to our parents, relatives, and friends, and to the Islamic Republic. We articulated all that happened to us in our own words and saw ourselves, for once, in our own image" (p. 57).

We follow the students as they gather each week. Managing, if only temporarily, to move beyond the confines of a society often unforgiving in its treatment of opinionated, "wayward" women. Nafisi describes how her pupils "shed their mandatory veils and robes" (p. 5) once inside her home, allowing for more authentic, outspoken, and usually less-guarded versions of themselves to surface. Together - as they consider the choices and fates coloring the lives of Daisy Miller, Jane Austen, and Lolita - the women shine a critical light onto what constitutes their lives. It is through fiction that they are given a forum for the consideration and questioning of their own realities. At certain points in the text, the stories of these women-both imagined and real-become almost poetically interwoven.

Reading Lolita allows us to consider the sometimes subversive, often vital, role literature can assume given a backdrop of suppressive, theocratic rule. Nafisi, at once a tender storyteller and frank critic, grants us insight into the lives of women "under the veil," women who rarely are given the chance to tell their own stories in their own voices. "Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe," she tells us as one point, "you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body" (p. 329). It is with such refreshing candor that Nafisi touches on the complicated intersections running between religion, gender, and politics in a place where national understandings of all three appear to be in a state of dizzying flux.

Hilal Nakiboglu is a doctoral candidate in higher education management at the University of Pennsylvania. Recently, she defended her doctoral dissertation entitled 'Being Down with the Brown' and Other Enactments of Hybridity: Indian American College Students Come of Age. Hilal is interested in South Asian American youth cultures and the politics of race/ethnicity.