Re-Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran

Abstract

It was 2003 when a little-known Iranian expatriate and former English professor named Azar Nafisi released a memoir of her life during the revolution and the years following that became an international bestseller. The book won nearly universal rave reviews from even the most feared of book critics and was translated into more than thirty languages. Reading Lolita in Tehran. A Memoir in Books weaves together many important stories concerning Iran's post-revolutionary politics, the fate of women under Islamist rule, and the difficulty of teaching literature in a climate of political upheaval. However, the narrative strand used most frequently to describe the book involves seven young women who meet clandestinely at Nafisi's house from 1995 to 1997 to discuss western literature that was considered counter-revolutionary, starting with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. In effect, the women constitute a subversive book club--a free space where they are shown removing their government-mandated shawls and overcoats and sitting down together, with books in hand, to savor language and discuss outlaw literature in a deliberately all-female setting; in this space they also commiserate over their loss of freedoms, drink tea and eat sweets, and tell the stories of their own lives a sort of literary Sex and the City (except the city is Tehran). The story of Reading Lolita, then, in part is the story of a women's book club, and it would be impossible to examine Nafisi's success as a writer without understanding that her memoir coincided with an explosion of largely female book clubs and reading groups starting in the 1990s. At their peak, American book clubs would claim as many as five to ten million female nationwide, according to Elizabeth Long's 2003 study, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Almond 1). In 2002, Newsweek magazine estimated a much lower number of in book clubs; they cited 750,000, but acknowledged this figure as conservative (Jones 55). Fueling the craze was Oprah Winfrey's nationwide book club, launched in 1996. Her selections of books and subsequent on-air discussions enriched and publishers alike. By the millennium, myriad specialty book clubs had formed, including groups of evangelical Christians, African American women, sci-fi fanatics, and countless others, some with chapters that met nationwide and some internet-based. As a direct result of the book club craze, according to Newsweek, Every major publisher prints readers guides, fills its Web site with discussion tips and author biographies and sets up conference calls between groups and authors (Jones 56). Given the surge in women's book clubs across the country, it is not surprising that Nafisi's book, which affirms the power of literature and women as readers, might find a receptive audience in the US. In fact, the headline of a 2004 Publishers Weekly article asks, Will Reading Lolita in Tehran Become One of the Year's Biggest Book Club Reads? (Abbott 106). The article credits the book's success to word-of-mouth recommendations from and bookstore owners, good critical reviews, dynamic appearances by Nafisi to promote the book, and a nonfiction storyline that works off beloved literary classics. Reading Lolita in Tehran also coincided with a growth in published personal memoirs, which have become wildly popular in recent years. Another key to the book's reception was certainly the American public's growing awareness of Iran, which by 2002 President Bush had named as part of the axis of evil. (Un)Critical Reaction to Reading Lolita In addition to being well-timed and drawing a vast readership, Nafisi's work also garnered lavish praise from fellow writers and professional critics representing a wide range of perspectives. For example, reviewers from the libertarian Reason magazine (Freund 64-65) to the conservative American Enterprise magazine (Pilon 56) to the leftist Nation (Emerson 11-12) lauded the book, some focusing on Nafisi's defiance of oppressive government and some emphasizing the plight of women in contemporary Iran. …