Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

This carelessness, a lack of empathy, appears in Jane Austen’s negative characters: in Lady Catherine, in Mrs. Norris, in Mr. Collins or the Crawfords. The theme recurs in Henry James’s stories and in Nabokov’s monster heroes: Humbert, Kinbote, Van and Ada Veen. Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can’t experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these

characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic—not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels—the biggest sin is to be blind to others’ problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

“Could one not say in fact that this blindness or carelessness towards others is a reminder of another brand of careless people?

“Those who see the world in black and white, drunk on the righteousness of their own fictions.

“The law?” Vida interrupted him. “You guys came in and changed the laws. Is it the law? So was wearing the yellow star in Nazi Germany. Should all the Jews have worn the star because it was the blasted law?

quietly. It teaches you to value your dreams but to be wary of them also, to look for integrity in unusual places.

question of loss, the loss of an illusion. Nick disapproves of all the people with

“Absolution,” calls the “honesty of imagination.

the truth is that he is a romantic and tragic dreamer, who becomes heroic because of his belief in his own romantic delusion.

He cannot change the world, so he re-creates himself according

to his dream.

America as a materialistic country but as an idealistic one, one that has turned money into a means of retrieving a dream.

crassness is so mingled with the dream that it becomes

very difficult to differentiate bet...

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 wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?

was scared of some lack, as if the future were receding from me.

Write about a similar experience where you felt this way in your own life.

nineteen years later, the Islamic regime would once again turn against its students. This time it would open fire on those it had admitted to the universities, those who were its own children, the children of the revolution. Once more my students would go to the hospitals in search of the murdered bodies that were stolen by the guards and vigilantes and try to prevent them from stealing the wounded. Only this time I was walking those grounds in my imagination as I read faxes and e-mails in my office in Washington, D.C., from my former students in Iran, trying to decipher something beyond the hysteria of their words.

Green revolution. 2009

There were only two forces in the world, the army of God and that of Satan.

How dangerous is this brand of thinking? Black and white at its worse polarity

The new regime had reached far beyond the romantic symbolism more or less prevalent in every

political system to inhabit a realm of pure myth, with devastating consequences.

Pure myth

had not realized how far the routines of one’s life create the illusion of stability. Now that I could not call myself a teacher, a writer, now that I could not wear what I would normally wear, walk in the streets to the beat of my own body, shout if I wanted to or pat a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment, now that all this was illegal, I felt light and fictional, as if I were walking on air, as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe.

like Claire in The American, turn their small corner into a sanctuary: the essential part of their life goes underground.

our true home, our true history, was in our poetry.

Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature.

It belonged to an Armenian, and forever shall I see on the glass door next to the name of the restaurant, which was in small letters, the compulsory sign in large black letters: RELIGIOUS MINORITY. All restaurants run by non-Muslims had to carry this sign on their doors so that good Muslims, who considered all non-Muslims dirty and did not eat from the same dishes, would be forewarned.

“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.

intellectuals, more than ordinary citizens, either play scrupulously into their hands and call it constructive dialogue or withdraw from life

completely in the name of fighting the regime.

don’t lose, and I don’t win. In fact, I don’t exist. You see, I have withdrawn not just from the Islamic Republic but from life as such, but you can’t do that—you have no desire to do that.

the reason I am so popular is that I give others back what they need to find in themselves. You need me not because I tell you what I want you to do but because I articulate and justify what you want to do.

That is why you like me—a man without qualities.

Man without qualities

is impossible not to be touched by the abyss. I know how you want to have your cake and eat it too, I know all about that innocence, that Alice in Wonderland persona you want to preserve.

the lady who constantly boasts about her love for Nabokov and Hammett is now telling me we should not do what we love! That is what I call immoral.

Great quote about teaching

I say teach because you enjoy teaching: you will nag less at home, you will be a better person and probably your students will also have fun and maybe even learn something.

And don’t worry about what we, your colleagues and friends, might say behind your back. We’ll talk behind your back no matter what you do.

If a sound can be preserved in the same manner as a leaf or a butterfly, I would say that within the pages of my Pride and Prejudice, that most polyphonic of all novels, and my Daisy Miller is hidden like an autumn leaf the sound of the red siren.

the novel, as a new narrative form, radically transformed basic concepts about the essential relationships between individuals, thereby changing traditional attitudes towards people’s relationship to society, their tasks and duties. Nowhere is this developing change so apparent as in relations between men and women. Ever since Clarissa Harlow and Sophia Western—two

she poignantly and defiantly desires that he prove his devotion to her not by preaching, but by approving of her as she is, without any preconditions. It is ironic that ultimately Daisy is the one who really cares, and proves her devotion by dying.

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

people like Ghomi always attack, because they are afraid of what they don’t understand.

What they say is we don’t need James, but what they really mean is we are afraid of this fellow James—he baffles us, he confuses us, he makes us a little uneasy.

chair trick. In the next session I started the class by picking up a chair and placing it in front of me. What do you see? I asked the class. A

chair. Then I placed the chair upside down. Now what do you see? Still a chair. Then I straightened the chair and asked a few students to stand in different places around the room, and asked both those standing and those sitting to describe the same chair. You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can you? No, obviously not. If you cannot say this about so simple an object as a chair, how can you possibly pass an absolute judgment on any given individual?

“I’m a perfectly equipped failure.” A perfectly equipped failure? he asked. Yes, and you know how she responds? “Thank goodness you’re a failure—it’s why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you—look at the successes. Would you be one, on your honour? Look, moreover,” she continued, “at me.

We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution.

the kind of awful beauty that can only be grasped through extreme anguish and expressed through art.

Bertolt Brecht kept running through my mind. I don’t remember it well: “Indeed we live in dark ages, where to speak of trees is a sort of a crime,

towards the end, something like