Reading Lolita in Tehran

by Azar Nafisi

In the cozy confusion of a sleepover, we fixed a breakfast of bread, fresh cream, homemade jam and coffee.

It was hard to tell if she was going to Turkey to please the others or because she was in love. This was my problem with Sanaz—one never knew what she really wanted.

“The first thing you should do to test your compatibility,” said Nassrin, “is dance with him.”

Austen’s protagonists are private individuals set in public places. Their desire for privacy and reflection is continually being adjusted to their situation within a very small community, which keeps them under its constant scrutiny. The balance between the public and the private is essential to this world.

Their inability to dance well is a sign of their inability to adapt themselves to the needs of their partners.

It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen’s novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy. Later, in Nabokov, this incapacity takes on monstrous forms in characters such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita and Kinbote in Pale Fire.

In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.

the first lesson in fighting tyranny is to do your own thing and satisfy your own conscience?”

She was in love—this should have been the best time of her life—but she was anxious about so many things. Of course, she had to lie to her father—more time on translating texts. She lived in so many parallel worlds: the so-called real world of her family, work and society; the secret world of our class and her young man; and the world she had created out of her lies. I wasn’t sure what she expected of me. Should I take on the role of a mother and tell her about the facts of life? Should I show more curiosity, ask for more details about him and their relationship?

“I don’t know,” she said. “No one ever taught me how to be happy. We’ve been taught that pleasure is the great sin, that sex is for procreation and so on and on and forth. I feel guilty, but I shouldn’t—not because I am interested in a man. In a man,” she repeated. “At my age! The fact is I don’t know what I want, and I don’t know if I am doing the right thing. I’ve always been told what is right—and suddenly I don’t know anymore. I know what I don’t want, but I don’t know what I want,” she said, looking down at the ice cream she had hardly touched.

How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.

it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don’t feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really.

“I can’t live with this constant fear,” said Mitra, “with having to worry all the time about the way I dress or walk. Things that come naturally to me are considered sinful, so how am I supposed to act?”

She used the Persian expression “for my own heart.”

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.

And I know now that my world, like Pnin’s, will be forever a “portable world.”

I also know of another “I” that has become naked on the pages of a book: in a fictional world, I have become fixed like a Rodin statue. And so I will remain as long as you keep me in your eyes, dear readers.