Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

“Alas, we who wanted kindness, could not be ...

There was one girl there—her only sin had been her amazing beauty. They brought her in on some trumped-up immorality charge. They kept her for over a month and repeatedly raped her. They passed her from one guard to another. That story got around jail very fast, because the girl wasn’t even political; she wasn’t with the political prisoners. They married the virgins off to the guards, who would later execute them. The philosophy behind this act was that if they were killed as virgins, they would go to heaven. You talk of betrayals.

“I am incapable of telling you not to repine and rebel,” he wrote, “because I have so, to my cost, the imagination of all things, and because I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say—feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to

live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and our inspiration.

They had been told that their own opinions counted for nothing.

Flaubert’s insights: “You should have a heart in order to feel other people’s hearts.

password, says the poet John Shade in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. This respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel. It is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabokov and Bellow. This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.

Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin

victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness—a word that is central in Austen’s novels but is seldom used in James’s universe. What James’s characters gain is self-respect.

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor/fleshless;/Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance/is.

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know.

I’m sorry, I feel your pain? My magician and Nassrin were of the type who did not want sympathy; they expected us to understand and to tailor our empathy to the shape of their grief.

told her what fun we had the day we chose our best and worst passages.

ecstatic grief.

At the start of the revolution, a rumor had taken root that Khomeini’s image could be seen in the moon. Many people, even perfectly modern and educated individuals, came to believe this. They had seen him in the moon. He had been a conscious mythmaker, and he had turned himself into a myth.

Like all great mythmakers, he had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end, like Humbert, he had managed to destroy both reality and his dream. Added to the crimes, to the murders and tortures, we would now face this last indignity—the murder of our dreams. Yet he had done this with our full compliance, our complete assent and complicity.

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What

one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. For it was a mistake. Live, live!

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

the most courageous characters here are those with imagination, those who, through their imaginative faculty, can empathize with others. When you lack this kind of courage, you remain ignorant of others’ feelings and needs.

Do what all poets do with their philosopher-kings. You don’t need to create a parallel fantasy of the West. Give them the best of what that other world can offer: give them pure fiction—give them back their imagination!

the first lesson in fighting tyranny is to do your own thing and satisfy your own conscience?

Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires.

“The ordeal of freedom,” Nassrin said elliptically, echoing my favorite line from Bellow.

What's that mean?

What you need to learn is to lay aside your inhibitions, to go back to your childhood

The fact is I don’t know what I want, and I don’t know if I am doing the right thing. I’ve always been told what is right—and suddenly I don’t know anymore. I know what I don’t want, but I don’t know what I want,” she said, looking down at the ice cream she had hardly touched.

Vincente Minnelli’s Designing Woman,

The amazing thing is that all of this is created mainly through tone—different tones of voice, words that become haughty and naughty, soft, harsh, coaxing, insinuating, insensible, vain.

The sense of touch that is missing from Austen’s novels is replaced by a tension, an erotic texture of sounds and silences.

She manages to create a feeling of longing by setting characters who wa...

Bellow’s novels are about private cruelties, about the ordeal of freedom, the burden of choice—so are James’s, for that matter. It’s frightening to be free, to have to take responsibility for your decisions.

Freedom is frightening it means you are responsible for your own decisions

“The meaning of the Revolution was that Russia had attempted to isolate itself from the ordeal of modern consciousness.

“Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances,” Bellow wrote, “is also to reach the heart of politics. The human feelings, human experiences, the human form and face, recover their proper place—the foreground.

“the patient stone,” which is often used in times of anxiety and turbulence. Supposedly, a person pours out all his troubles and woes into the stone. It will listen and absorb his pains and secrets, and this way he will be cured. Sometimes the stone can no longer endure its burden and then it bursts.

memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.

There, in jail, we dreamed of just being outside, free, but when I came out, I discovered that I missed the sense of solidarity we had in jail, the sense of purpose, the way we tried to share memories and food. She said, More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to movies. I am twenty-seven. I don’t know what it means to love. I don’t want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is. You’d call it the ordeal of freedom,

What jails you? Where do you find solidarity? Where would you escape from?

And now they wanted me to carry the burden of their choices as well. People’s choices were their own.

Are they? What responsibility do teachers bear? Miss Jean Brody?

Other people’s sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?

She was angry for the years she had missed, for her lost portion of the sun and wind, for the walks she had not taken with Hamid.

“Both Yassi and I know that we have been losing our faith. We have been questioning it with every move. During the Shah’s time, it was different. I felt I was in the minority and I had to guard my faith against all odds. Now that my religion is in power, I feel more helpless than ever before, and more alienated.

Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe, I said to Bijan that evening after the Thursday class.

Well, it’s like this: if you’re forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank—you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That’s what we do over here. We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else—we either plan it or dream

how strange it is when you look in that mirror on the opposite wall that instead of seeing yourself, you see the trees and the mountains, as if you have magically willed yourself away?

your girls must resent the fact that while you’re leaving this guy behind, they have to keep sleeping with him—some of them,

They have the power to kill us or flog us, but all of this only reminds them of their weakness. They must be scared out of their wits to see what’s happening to their own former comrades, and to their children.

Do those in power worry?

Sometimes I think men just can’t relate to how difficult it is to be a woman in this country, she said with frustration. For them it’s easier, said Yassi. In a way, this place can be a man’s paradise. Hamid tells me, said Mitra, that if we make a good living, we can always take our vacations abroad.

“I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions. To have a whole life, one must have the possibility of publicly shaping

and expressing private worlds, dreams, thoughts and desires,

of constantly having access to a dialogue between the public and private worlds. How else do we know that we have exis...

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