Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.

Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Daisy Miller, The Dean’s December and, yes, Lolita.

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. Now, after a period of relative calm and so-called liberalization, we had again entered a time of hardships.

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

A Thousand and One Nights, the familiar tale of the cuckolded king who slew successive virgin wives as revenge for his queen’s betrayal, and whose murderous hand was finally stayed by the entrancing storyteller Scheherazade.

the condemned man’s only privilege is to know the time of his death—

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,

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.

The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another.

What we have here is the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

(“We are not against cinema,” Ayatollah Khomeini had declared as his henchmen set fire to the movie houses, “we are against prostitution!”)

that something has been bothering her for some time. Why is it that stories like Lolita and Madame Bovary—

Much later, when I read a sentence by Nabokov—“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”—

Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.

“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.”

“We need to be honest with ourselves,” she said. “I mean, that is the first condition. As women, do we have the same right as men to enjoy sex? How many of us would say yes, we do have a right, we have an equal right to enjoy sex, and if our husbands don’t satisfy us, then we have a right to seek satisfaction elsewhere.”

And that memorable day was the beginning of our detailing our long list of debts to the Islamic Republic: parties, eating ice cream in public, falling in love, holding hands, wearing lipstick, laughing in public and reading Lolita in Tehran.

Did you know that one way to cure a man’s sexual appetites is by having sex with animals? And then there’s the problem of sex with chickens. You have to ask yourself if a man who has had sex with a chicken can then eat the chicken afterwards. Our leader has provided us with an answer: No, neither he nor his immediate family or next-door neighbors can eat of that chicken’s meat, but it’s okay for a neighbor who lives two doors away.

didn’t value books (“the problem with you and your family is that you live more in books than in reality”),

Long-haired preachers come out every night And they tell you what’s wrong and what’s right And when you ask them for something to eat They tell you in voices so sweet: You will eat by and by, in that glorious place in the sky Work and pray, live on hay, you will get pie in sky when you die. That’s a lie!

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,

That was the first time I experienced the desperate, orgiastic pleasure of this form of public mourning: it was the one place where people mingled and touched bodies and shared emotions without restraint or guilt. There was a wild, sexually flavored frenzy in the air. Later, when I saw a slogan by Khomeini saying that the Islamic Republic survives through its mourning ceremonies, I could testify to its truth.

That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all.

I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.”

The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted.

That was when the myth of America started to take hold of Iran. Even those who wished its death were obsessed by it. America had become both the land of Satan and Paradise Lost.

Tender Is the Night in 1934.

We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. 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.

Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual’s personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless.

As Fitzgerald puts it, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”

Dreams, Mr. Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.

He also recommended that women dress properly when sleeping, so that if their houses were hit, they would not be “indecently exposed to strangers’ eyes.”

collecting almost all the Jameses and all six novels by Austen. I picked up Howards End and A Room with a View.

Vanity Fair and The Adventures of Roderick Random, Humboldt’s Gift and Henderson the Rain King.

as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe.

Murder on the Orient Express, Sense and Sensibility, The Master and Margarita, Herzog, The Gift, The Count of Monte Cristo, Smiley’s People

I was reminded of a story I had heard and reheard about the Arab conquest of Persia, a conquest that brought Islam into Iran. By this account, when the Arabs attacked Iran, they won because the Persians themselves, perhaps tired of tyranny, had betrayed their king and opened the doors to their enemies. But after the invasion, when their books were burned, their places of worship destroyed and their language overtaken, the Persians took revenge by re-creating their burned and plundered history through myth and language. Our great epic poet Ferdowsi had rewritten the confiscated myths of Persian kings and heroes in a pure and sacred language.

“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.”

In The Tragic Muse, James explains that his goal in writing is to produce “art as a human complication and social stumbling block,”

When two of my cousins were killed by the Islamic regime, some of my relatives who were now on the side of the government called my uncle to congratulate him on the death of his son and daughter-in-law.

His critics, like H. G. Wells, blamed him for his mandarin attitude towards life, which prevented him from any involvement with the social and political issues of the day.

He had said that the greatest freedom of man was his “independence of thought,” which enabled the artist to enjoy the “aggression of infinite modes of being.”

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.

Everyone has gone postmodern. They can’t even read the text in the original—they’re so dependent on some pseudo-philosopher to tell them what it says.

dispensable object. I decided to buy it for my magician. I had a theory that some gifts should be bought for their own sake, exactly because they were useless.

We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.—Henry James

She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves. It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.