More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
When we had deprived the house of all its items, when the objects had vanished and the colors had faded into eight gray suitcases, like errant genies evaporating into their bottles,
Azin’s smiles never looked like smiles; they appeared more like preludes
I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won’t really exist if you don’t.
We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.
Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine would suddenly give way to showers and storms. It was unpredictable: the regime would go through cycles of some tolerance, followed by a crackdown.
Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
she said in that special tone of hers that I can only describe as a flirtatious pout.
There were two very important men dominating Sanaz’s life at the time. The first was her brother. He was nineteen years old and had not yet finished high school and was the darling of their parents, who, after two girls, one of whom had died at the age of three, had finally been blessed with a son. He was spoiled, and his one obsession in life was Sanaz. He had taken to proving his masculinity by spying on her, listening to her phone conversations, driving her car around and monitoring her actions. Her parents had tried to appease Sanaz and begged her, as the older sister, to be patient and
...more
I had explained to them the purpose of the class: to read, discuss and respond to works of fiction. Each would have a private diary, in which she should record her responses to the novels, as well as ways in which these works and their discussions related to her personal and social experiences. I explained that I had chosen them for this class because they seemed dedicated to the study of literature.
reminded them of the nineteen-year-old Nabokov, who, during the Russian Revolution, would not allow himself to be diverted by the sound of bullets. He kept on writing his solitary poems while he heard the guns and saw the bloody fights from his window.
We were not looking for blueprints, for an easy solution, but we did hope to find a link between the open spaces the novels provided and the closed ones we were confined to.
Scheherazade breaks the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement. She fashions her universe not through physical force, as does the king, but through imagination and reflection. This gives her the courage to risk her life and sets her apart from the other characters in the tale.
It is only through these empty rituals that brutality becomes possible.
What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner.
An absurd fictionality ruled our lives. We tried to live in the open spaces, in the chinks created between that room, which had become our protective cocoon, and the censor’s world of witches and goblins outside. Which of these two worlds was more real, and to which did we really belong? We no longer knew the answers. Perhaps one way of finding out the truth was to do what we did: to try to imaginatively articulate these two worlds and, through that process, give shape to our vision and identity.
She, Yassi, had much potential; she could be whatever she wanted to be—a good wife or a teacher and poet. What mattered was for her to know what she wanted.
“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”—the
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance.
“Well, that is the crux of the great novels,” Manna added, “like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, or James’s for that matter—the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.” “And what if we say that it is right to do what we want to do and not what society or some authority figure tells us to do?” said Nassrin, this time without bothering to lift her head from her notebook. There was something in the air that day that did not relate directly to the books we had read. Our discussion had plunged us into more personal and private arenas, and my girls found that they could not resolve
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
reached a compromise with my conscience,”
She seemed to want to at once say something and reveal nothing.
The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other. That is why, in their world, rituals—empty rituals—become so central.
In the end, when Cincinnatus is led to the scaffold, and as he lays his head on the scaffold, in preparation for his execution, he repeats the magic mantra: “by myself.” This constant reminder of his uniqueness, and his attempts to write, to articulate and create a language different from the one imposed upon him by his jailers, saves him at the last moment, when he takes his head in his hands and walks away towards voices that beckon him from that other world, while the scaffold and all the sham world around him, along with his executioner, disintegrate.
(“A woman enters her husband’s home in her wedding gown and leaves it in her shroud”).
German thinker Theodor Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.”
Let’s look at what he’s done to give this scene the texture of a real experience.
If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this.
felt a silent defiance that may also have shaped my public desire to defend a vague and amorphous entity I thought of as myself.
“Those who see the world in black and white, drunk on the righteousness of their own fictions.
“You don’t read Gatsby,” I said, “to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil…”
famous statement by Comrade Lenin about how listening to “Moonlight Sonata” made him soft. He said it made him want to pat people on the back when we needed to club them,
had a feeling that day that I was losing something, that I was mourning a death that had not yet occurred. I felt as if all things personal were being crushed like small wildflowers to make way for a more ornate garden, where everything would be tame and organized. I had never felt this sense of loss when I was a student in the States. In all those years, my yearning was tied to the certainty that home was mine for the having, that I could go back anytime I wished. It was not until I had reached home that I realized the true meaning of exile. As I walked those dearly beloved, dearly remembered
...more
Now that I could not call myself a teacher, a writer, now that I could not wear what I would normally wear, walk in the streets to the beat of my own body, shout if I wanted to or pat a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment, now that all this was illegal, 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.
“You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar, but the door is now metal instead of wood, the walls have been painted a garish pink, the easy chair you loved so much is gone. Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set. This is your house, and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house, to its walls and doors and floors; you are not seen.”
What do people who are made irrelevant do? They will sometimes escape, I mean physically, and if that is not possible, they will try to make a comeback, to become a part of the game by assimilating the characteristics of their conquerors. Or they will escape inwardly and, like Claire in The American, turn their small corner into a sanctuary: the essential part of their life goes underground.
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.
“Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche had said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
But our realities are what has brought us together. We’re beaten brothers in arms.”
a poem by Bertolt Brecht kept running through my mind. I don’t remember it well: “Indeed we live in dark ages, where to speak of trees is a sort of a crime,” it went. I wish I could remember the poem better, but there is a line towards the end, something like “Alas, we who wanted kindness, could not be kind ourselves.”
“I am incapable of telling you not to repine and rebel,” he wrote, “because I have so, to my cost, the imagination of all things, and because I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say—feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration.”
“the funeral spell of our murdered civilization.”
Could I ask her my favorite question: Did you two fall in love?
I don’t know why people who are better off always think that those less fortunate than themselves don’t want to have the good things—that they don’t want to listen to good music, eat good food or read Henry James.
We envy people like you and we want to be you; we can’t, so we destroy you.
one of Flaubert’s insights: “You should have a heart in order to feel other people’s hearts.”
This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.
At the start of the revolution, the revolutionary prosecutor bulldozed Reza Shah’s grave, destroying the monument and creating a public toilet in its place—which he inaugurated by pissing in it.
The next night it was announced that Iraq would accept a cease-fire if it could fire the last missile. It was like a game played between two children—what mattered most was who would get the last word.