Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
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Read between September 8 - October 7, 2023
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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. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own
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“It is interesting,” said Nassrin, “that Nabokov, who is so hard on poshlust, would make us pity the loss of the most conventional forms of life.”
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“Is it possible to write a reverent novel,” said Nassrin, “and to have it be good?
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Some things are offensive to some people.”
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Azin had been married three times,
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felt this was a point against the class, as if it should somehow guarantee open air and sunshine beyond its confines.
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Negar,
Stephanie
that name would be rather fortunate in the US
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how do you think she feels when they force us to trample on the American flag and shout, Death to America?
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Azin, Nima, Manna, Mahshid and Nassrin were frequent visitors.
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with a desk and a very old laptop,
Stephanie
In 1996????
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apart from one of the sisters—Yassi’s mother—they all had to put up with spoiled, nagging husbands, inferior to them intellectually and in every other way.
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We, like all normal Iranian citizens, were guilty and had something to hide: we were worried about our satellite dish.
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This constant assault, this persistent lack of kindness, was what frightened me most.
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Satellite dishes were becoming the rage all over Iran.
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David Hasselhoff, the star of Baywatch, bragged that his show was the most popular show in Iran.
Stephanie
Checks out
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Manna later explained how their attachment was based, more than anything else, on words.
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He used no sources, had not read Nabokov, but his thesis fascinated the professor, who had a thing about young girls spoiling the lives of intellectual men.
Stephanie
That is a fierce read
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Sanaz’s brother was by now a constant topic of conversation, one of a series of male villains who resurfaced from week to week.
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“Nima tells me we don’t understand the difficulty men face here,” said Manna with a hint of sarcasm. “They too don’t know how to act. Sometimes they act like macho bullies because they feel vulnerable.”
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“Someone who goes crazy at the sight of a woman’s toe . . . wow!” she continued, “My toe as a lethal weapon!”
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Sadawi, a doctor, had gone to some lengths to explain the horrendous effects of genitally mutilating young girls in order to curb their sexual appetites.
Stephanie
:(
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Sanaz kept emphasizing that they were all properly dressed,
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In some perverse way, the physical punishment was a source of satisfaction to her, a compensation for having yielded to those other humiliations. When
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a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”
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My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past.
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one’s individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.
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His face took on a smile that later became very familiar to me: complicit, reconciling, cynical. Do you argue with a mad dog? someone later asked me.
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The day I said yes, I knew I was going to divorce him. There were no limits to my self-destructive urges and the risks I was prepared to take with my own life.
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Later I would go to parties with my true love, who introduced me to Nabokov when he gave me Ada, in whose flyleaf he had written: To Azar, my Ada, Ted.
Stephanie
Interesting
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One attraction was the fact that the men in the movement didn’t try to assault or seduce me.
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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.
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naÏve
Stephanie
Oops
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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.”
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When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic,
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She would wear the veil to fight U.S. imperialists, to show them . . . To show them what? I
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Already our carefree mood seemed a little out of place, but we had not yet given up hope.
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His mother was telling him that he deserved to die because he had betrayed the revolution and his faith, and he agreed with her. They both sat there on what seemed to be an empty stage except for their two chairs. They sat opposite each other, talking as they might have of arrangements for his forthcoming marriage. Only they were casually agreeing that his crimes were so heinous that the only way he could atone for them and save his family’s honor was to embrace death.
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Never once was there a protest against the killings: the demands were almost always punctually for more blood. I,
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I can still remember, when my father was in jail, the number of times my mother would curse this general and his fellow conspirators. And now here he was, in civilian clothes, pleading for forgiveness from judges whose stern brutality even he could not fathom.
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I felt strangely connected to him, as if the complete surrender of his dignity had also diminished me.
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Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No I didn’t, but I should have. After we all helped create this mess, we were not doomed to have the Islamic Republic.
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were only demanding destruction of the old, without much thought to the consequences.
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his special kind of arrogance, that of a naturally shy and reserved young man who had discovered an absolutist refuge called Islam.
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She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of her sacred relationship to God, had now become an instrument of power,
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I was not unfond of Mr. Bahri, and yet I developed a habit of blaming him and holding him responsible
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THIS IS NOT A STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE U.S. AND IRAN, IT’S A STRUGGLE BETWEEN ISLAM AND BLASPHEMY. THE MORE WE DIE, THE STRONGER WE WILL BECOME.
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We wouldn’t be free until the Voice of America was shut down.
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A festival? A picnic? An Islamic Woodstock?
Stephanie
Lol
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I could never accept this air of festivity, the jovial arrogance that dominated the crowds in front of the embassy.
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America, the place I knew and had lived in for so many years, had suddenly been turned into a never-never land by the Islamic Revolution.
Stephanie
No one asks her yo so whats actually going on in america on an average day