Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

Humbert exonerates himself by implicating his victim

“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form

“It is desirable that the inmate should not have dreams at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose context might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape.

Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people. He had created the Lolita he desired, and would not budge from that image. I reminded them of Humbert’s statement that he wished to stop time and keep Lolita forever on “an island of entranced time,” a task undertaken only by Gods and poets.

some critics seem to treat the text the same way Humbert treats Lolita: they only see themselves and what they want to see.” She turned to me and continued: “I mean, the censors, or some of our politicized critics, don’t they do the same thing, cutting up books and re-creating them in their own image?

“Is it possible to write a reverent novel,

the contract with the reader is that this is not reality, it’s an invented world. There must be some blasted space in life,” she added crossly, “where we can be offensive, for God’s sake.

when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.

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.

spoke as if the events did not belong to us; like schizophrenic patients, we tried to keep ourselves away from that other self, at once intimate and alien.

“first little throb of Lolita” went through him in 1939 or early 1940, when he was ill with a severe attack of intercostal

“the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by 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.

The scientist is Humbert Humbert.

Manna had once written about a pair of pink socks for which she was reprimanded by the Muslim Students’ Association. When she complained to a favorite professor, he started teasing her about how she had already ensnared and trapped her man, Nima, and did not need the pink socks to entrap him further.

Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had.

But what about the acts of transgression on our ordinary lives, like the desire to wear pink socks?

Great question. How does this relate to our own country?

Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.

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.

“by myself.

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.

Mike Gold: he was the editor of the radical popular literary journal New Masses.

what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at

Theodor Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.” I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home.

The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.

outlaw certain gestures and expression of emotions, including love.

It banned ballet and dancing and told ballerinas they had a choice between acting or singing. Later women were banned from singing, because a woman’s voice, like her hair,

Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” about how the artist “appeals to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain . . . and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in

aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.

The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked on to it.

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 inh...

protest meeting. Two distinct and hostile groups had formed among the protesters, eyeing each other suspiciously. The first, smaller group consisted mainly of

Demonstrations akin to USA demonstrations riots etc.

government workers

and house...

believe it is my duty as a human being to acquaint you with this aspect of the accused’s personality.” Such an action, during those initial black-and-white days of the revolution, was unheard of and very dangerous.

“Such an act,” she explains, “can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature, has learned that every individual has different

dimensions to his personality. . . . 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. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them. . . . If we had learned this one lesson from Dr. A our society would have been in a much better shape today.

There were no innocents in the game of life, that was for sure. We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle. I did not know then that I had already begun to pay, that what was happening was part of the payment. It was much later that these feelings would be clarified.

The novel was immoral. It taught the youth the wrong stuff; it poisoned their minds—surely I could see? I could not. I reminded him that

How do we read gatsby? Is he someone we wish to emulate or do we see the trap of the dream?

Gatsby was a work of fiction and not a how-to manual.

Tell me in your own words what Gatsby means to you.

“He leaves no space, no breathing room, between the two worlds. He has demonstrated his own weakness: an inability to read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment, crude and simplistic exaltation of right and wrong.

“But is a novel good,” continued Zarrin, addressing the class, “because the heroine is virtuous? Is it bad if its character strays from the moral Mr. Nyazi insists on imposing not only on us but on all fiction?

‘To me the freedom of [the author’s] style is almost the guarantee of the purity of his morals.

It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront

the absolutes we believe in. If that is true, then Gatsby has succeeded brilliantly. This is the first time in class that a...

“Remember the famous trials of Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Lolita? In each case the novel won. But let me focus on a point that seems to trouble his honor the judge as well as the prosecutor: the lure of money and its role in the novel.

‘Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.’ If there is a judge in this novel, it is Nick. In a sense he is the least colorful character, because he acts as a mirror.

Would you agree that your aim is not a defense of the wealthy classes?