Man's best friend outside of a dog, 6: Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi

With Iran in the news, I decided to clear out the growing Persian presence on my shelf of books to read. Most of the news coming out of Iran at the moment is pretty bad, though there are some funny exceptions to that rule. Anyway, the first book up is Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, which has certainly made the rounds of the book club circuit over the past year.

It's not hard to see why this book is so popular. Iranian society remains a mystery to most people in America, and this book goes a long way toward undercutting some of the more outlandish notions we may possess about them. In particular, it becomes immediately evident that while the public face of Iran is one of religions hardliners and fundamentalist rule, the society there was, and still is, vastly more modern than we ever give them credit for. American ignorance can hardly be considered shocking by now, and it says something that of the few Americans who can recognize Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as President of Iran that very few realize that though he may be an anti-Semitic provocateur, he has very little power over any foriegn policy issue whatsoever (that would be the milieu of Ayatollah Khamenei and the clerical establishment). Neither of these political forces represents the actual population all that well (not that I would dare to suggest a similar principle applies with regard to American society...) Iranians love their illegal satellite dishes, their forbidden music (click on the second link above), and just about all the other things that we would love in the same circumstances.

Nafisi's book does present a thorough treatment of one facet of life that Americans do have trouble imagining: life under the rule of a truly oppressive government, especially during wartime on one's own soil. While we were sending weapons openly to Iraq and under the table to Iran, the people there were suffering under the double threat of foreign missiles and self-imposed political terror. The choices faced by liberals and intellectuals were truly terrible, much worse than anything their counterparts over here have had to go through. Even in the most extreme cases where the US government spied on peace groups, they didn't just haul people off and summarily execute them. As for those who wholeheartedly get behind an ideological movement, Nafisi has even less respect for such people than I do. There have always been many people out there, especially among the young and impressionable, willing to slaughter their fellow men for the sake of Revolution, or God, or Country, or any other capital-letter ideal, but the ends are almost never happy ones. Among the most striking passages of the book is the trial of The Great Gatsby by one of her classes, where the book is accused of all manner of evils and recommended for banning by the hardline students, as if the ideas themselves are dangerous. One could suggest of course, that this is the ultimate failure of debate: if an idea you dislike is so very appealing, then you have failed in your duty to build a better counterargument.

I should say that discussing the book only in terms of its grand themes does it a disservice: it is not a mere political statement, but a memoir, and a damn good one at that. Centered around the private sessions the author held in secret with seven students who were devoted to literature, the book doesn't scream it's positions on imagination and individual expression, it paints them in rather fetching language. If anything, Nafisi is at her weakest when dealing with her own reactions to newsworthy events: in describing her own reactions she seems to get so involved that she loses some of the strength of her narrative voice. Instead, she is at her best describing the others around her: how they react, how they interact, and how they maintain their own concepts of identity in the midst of a regime trying to undercut it through physical and mental intimidation. Nafisi is clearly from the school of teaching via contrast and comparison, and it is the reflections and refractions between she and her students, her students with each other, and all the other pairings upon which this book has earned its reputation. Definitely worth a read, if for no other reason to remind us that the people that many people in our government are looking to bomb to smithereens in the near future are very much like us once you look past the headscarves.