Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.

Could one really concentrate on one’s job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word wine from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Brontë because she appeared to condone adultery?

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

“a space of our own,”

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

remember reading to my girls Nabokov’s claim that “readers were born free and ought to remain free.”

Scheherazade breaks the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement. She fashions her universe not through physical force,

words and expressions, a repository that grew over time until gradually we had created a secret language of our own.

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

must retreat into himself in order to survive.

“Many people feel that Rushdie portrayed their religion in a distorted and irreverent manner. I mean, they don’t object to his writing fiction but to his being offensive.”

And they did not object to the death sentence he lived under

There must be some blasted space in life,” she added crossly, “where we can be offensive, for God’s sake.”

“No one was talking about making a choice between adultery and hypocrisy. The point is, do we have any morality at all? Do we consider that anything goes, that we have no responsibility towards others but only for satisfying our needs?”

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer,

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality,

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.

The reality of Gatsby’s life is that he is a charlatan. But the truth is that he is a romantic and tragic dreamer, who becomes heroic because of his belief in his own romantic delusion.

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?

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.

“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.”

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.

A hero becomes one who safeguards his or her individual integrity at almost any cost.

Every great book we read became a challenge to the ruling ideology. It became a potential threat and menace not so much because of what it said but how it said it, the attitude it took towards life and fiction.

It was ironic that a Muslim fundamentalist should quote Said against Austen. It was just as ironic that the most reactionary elements in Iran had come to identify with and

co-opt the work and theories of those considered revolutionary in the West.

The Iranian revolutionary sounds like the Woke university students who are willing to toss the baby with the bath water to decry colonialism.

they called Mr. Nahvi the Mr. Collins of Tabatabai University, after Jane Austen’s pompous clergyman.

I had the very same thought

Now, please listen carefully to that “you.” Darcy seldom if ever addresses Elizabeth by her name, but he has a special way of saying “you” when he addresses her a few times that makes the impersonal pronoun a term of ultimate intimacy. One should appreciate such nuances in a culture such as ours, where everyone is encouraged to demonstrate in the most exaggerated manner his love for the Imam and yet forbidden from any public articulation of private feelings, especially love.

(there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen’s novels)

Except perhaps Mr. Bennett P&P

They risk ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose.

Austen’s theme is cruelty not under extraordinary circumstances but ordinary ones, committed by people like us.

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. Yes, he said, to have no Islamic Republic to blame. And I’m not saying they’re blameless, he added after a brief pause—far from it.

There is a term in Persian, “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.