Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

thriving on and filling their own emptiness through others’ secrets.

Which one of you will finally betray me?

not even the two who are still wearing their head scarves look the same.

our poet, Manna,

Mahshid was good at many things, but she had a certain daintiness about her and we took to calling her “my lady.”

Yassi was the youngest

Yassi was shy by nature, but certain things excited her and made her lose her inhibitions.

Azin, my tallest student, with her long blond hair

Mitra, who was perhaps the calmest

Sanaz, who, pressured by family and society, vacillated between her desire for independence and her need for approval,

There was one more: Nassrin. She is not in the photographs—she didn’t make it to the end.

Nassrin is in many of them, but always hidden behind something—a person, a tree.

I once called her the Cheshire cat,

Oddly, these incongruous ingredients created a symmetry that the other, more deliberately furnished rooms in the apartment lacked.

Later, I would count it as the class’s great achievement that such a mixed group, with different and at times conflicting backgrounds, personal as well as religious and social, remained so loyal to its goals and ideals.

peculiar mixture of fragility and courage I sensed in them.

But, she added, everyday life does not have fewer horrors than prison.

I feel too greedy for colors to see them in carefully chosen words of poetry. Manna was one of those people who would experience ecstasy but not happiness.

left the meticulously drawn face imprisoned in a careless splash of dark color.

Let us see, I said, whether seventy years later our disinterested faith will reward us by transforming the gloomy reality created of this other revolution.

The virgins, who, unlike Scheherazade, have no voice in the story, are mostly ignored by the critics.

The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality.

Poshlust, Nabokov explains, “is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.”

the nightmarish quality of living in an atmosphere of perpetual dread.

utopian

Distopian?

They are ridiculous and they can be defeated, and this does not lessen the tragedy—the waste.

the possibility of a boundless freedom when all options are taken away.

like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom.

MY SISTER, GUARD YOUR VEIL. MY BROTHER, GUARD YOUR EYES.

Huh i wasnt expecting a command to men t all

where so many of my students complain of being harassed by bearded and God-fearing men.

Is she aware, Sanaz, of her own power? Does she realize how dangerous she can be when her every stray gesture is a disturbance to public safety?

He had come in the name of a past, a past that, he claimed, had been stolen from him.

Although she understood the most difficult texts better than many of the graduate students,

To Yassi’s surprise, the two girls behind her, both active members of the Muslim Students’ Association, had started to giggle, whispering, No wonder more and more Muslims are converting to Christianity.

I am sad to disillusion them

They felt the Islamic Republic was a betrayal of Islam rather than its assertion.

She had always worn the veil. Did she want to wear it or not? She did not know.

At some point, the truth of Iran’s past became as immaterial to those who appropriated it

The butterfly is not an obvious symbol,

No?

They think they cannot find men equal to them.

Unlike in pre-revolutionary times, now the “non-Revolutionary writers,” the bearers of the canon, were the ones celebrated by the young:

the yellow and red leaves reflected in the dining room mirror are drenched in a haze.

Lol haze

especially the annotated version that my girls wanted to have.

Oo i have that one

They all miss the fact that the ‘horrid little brat’ Lolita is essentially very good indeed—or she would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly, and found a decent life with poor Dick more to her liking than the other kind.”

Nabokov’s art is revealed in his ability to make us feel sympathy for Humbert’s victims—at least for his two wives, Valeria and Charlotte—without our approving of them.

Like the best defense attorneys, who dazzle with their rhetoric and appeal to our higher sense of morality,

Lol thats what you serve up when you dont have an alibi

although this child, had she lived in the Islamic Republic, would have been long ripe for marriage to men older than Humbert.)

Why is it that stories like Lolita and Madame Bovary—stories that are so sad, so tragic—make us happy?

when I was pulled out of the security of Mr. Holmes’s—I think that was his name

Lol naming hom after the camp lady

but I could get angry at him or at my husband, at all the men who were so cautious, so worried about me, for “my sake.”

Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said.