Harrell READers

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a testimony to the power of books to understand, amplify, and shape real life.

I was the kid with the flashlight under the covers at night. Now, I am the adult with books in every room of her house.

When I was in college, the library was a place where physical objects to read (books, microfiche, scholarly journals, newspapers) were located and where one could study (preferably in the stacks, where the books were). While libraries still have study tables, often they are no longer repositories for books and other physical artifacts—much of the print collection is stored elsewhere, journals are online rather than in print, and what was once saved as microfiche is now born digital. Instead, libraries provide access to computers, opportunities to borrow or rent gadgets, and places to congregate or hold events. For those of us with strong memories of time spent in libraries surrounded by things to read, these developments are disorienting.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a testimony to the power of books to understand, amplify, and shape real life. Azar Nafisi returned to Iran in 1979, as a 30-year-old with a PhD in literature and a desire to play a part in the transformation of her native country, a transformation that early on takes a different route than the one she fought for. The book chronicles her experiences teaching at the University of Tehran and two other universities, her struggles with the Islamist regime and its repression of women and political dissidents, the formation of her private literature class for female students, and her decision to leave Iran for the United States after 18 years in the country. Throughout, iconic literary texts—Lolita and Invitation to a Beheading, by Vladimir Nabokov; The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Washington Square and Daisy Miller, by Henry James; and Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen—serve as interpretive guides for what is happening in her life.

During her tenure at the University of Tehran, from which she was fired for refusing to wear a veil, her students put Gatsby (the book) on trial. Nafisi herself represented the book as defendant. Asked by the defense attorney whether her aim (as the book) was “not a defense of the wealthy classes?” she answers: “Imagination in [all] these works is equated with empathy; we can’t experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction” (132). Reading Lolita in Tehran challenges us to remember the power of books to give us access to a world larger than the one we typically inhabit and to extend moments of grace to all those we encounter in their pages. It also reminds us that books come to inhabit us and our ways of being in the world.

Nabokov’s Lolita, incongruously, is the emblem for all that was happening—and continues to happen—to those oppressed: “it went against the grain of totalitarian perspectives” (35) because it shows us a character who attempts to annihilate the personhood of the person he purports to love. Later in the book, after she has been fired from her teaching position, forced to wear a veil, and forbidden to touch men or shout in public, Nafisi writes, “I felt light and fictional, as if I were walking on air, as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe” (167). Her book reminds us that fictionality is both real and ephemeral, grounding us in our lives and providing escape routes when necessary.