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Reading Lolita is a journey to Tehran and back again

by Jonathan B. Frey

Clifford Geertz, author of Islam Observed, recently wrote that "we are, in this country right now, engaged in the process of constructing, rather hurriedly, as though we had better quickly get on with it after years of neglect, a standard, public-square image of Islam." Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, $24) perhaps unintentionally assists in forming this image, joining the more overt endeavors of Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong?, Karen Armstrong's Islam: A Short History, and even the recent memoir of Jordan's American-born Queen Noor, Leap of Faith.

Chronologically speaking, Reading Lolita is an apt starting point to examine Islam's American image, as it was the Shah's downfall, the rise of Islamic visionary Ayatollah Khomeini, the much-publicized embassy hostages, and the ultimate loss of Iran as a key ally in the Middle East a quarter of century ago that first propelled Islam into American national consciousness. Nafisi, returning to Iran from the US in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution in full swing, describes the ensuing 20 years, unexpectedly capturing her experiences through the lens of the 19th and 20th century novel.

Sadly, the image this lens forms is not flattering. In fact, it uncannily resembles V.S. Naipaul's indictment that "Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief...The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism." And so too Nafisi would have Iran's Islamic Revolution; Iran may've first succumbed to Islam in the 7th century, but the social progress of the ensuing centuries has been discarded in the final decades of the 20th, whereupon a strange neurosis genuinely does appear to have taken root.

Nafisi captures these decades through her memoir's conceit, teaching English Literature at universities in Tehran and convening a weekly all-women's book club. Structured around discussions of the works of Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen, Reading Lolita serves to reveal incongruities and parallels with daily life in Iran, linking "open spaces the novels provided and the closed ones [Nafisi and her students] were confined to." Enter the absurdity of Nafisi's enterprise, exemplified by "Death to America" chants filtering into her classroom window while discussing the American Dream as manifest in Great Gatsby. Or a lecture on the idea of courage in The Ambassadors interrupted by an impassioned student who sets fire to himself, all the while shouting revolutionary slogans.

Such bizarreness is dwarfed by the more profound incongruity of this memoir and of Nafisi's entire 20-year sojourn in Tehran: her confessed allegiance to "ideals and how to confront the real world with the possibilities created by fictional ones," when "possibilities," "fictions," confronting ideals, and their progeny are outright subversions or unrecognized concepts by the ruling Islamic elite. Which leads this reader to pose the eternal question, "What's a nice free-thinking girl like her doing in a place like this?"

Nafisi answers that question, in the meantime documenting mounting social regressions, most notably the suppression of Iran's pre-Islamic history as well as women's rights (enforced wearing of the chador to conceal female appeal, prohibition against cosmetics and laughing in public, onerous Islamic marriage laws). Equally disturbing are the government-sponsored, Islamic slogan-chanting thugs that during the war with Iraq surrounded houses recently shelled by Iraqi bombers, in order to curb any expression of anti-government sentiment the shelling may've galvanized in war-weary Tehran. Less severe but certainly wacky are the curtains placed across beaches and into the Caspian Sea, forcing separation of the sexes during beach holidays. Simply hysterical is the Iranian Gipsy Kings impersonation flamenca rhumba band that is permitted to perform publicly, on the condition that the band members show no enthusiasm for their performance and that the audience doesn't tap, sway, or in any way react, all overseen by a coterie of Islamic minders to ensure the death mask affect is maintained. Neurotic indeed.

While at times grim, Reading Lolita engages for its news of life in an otherwise impenetrable, aspiring Islamic utopia, for the insights into the works of fiction discussed, as well as for Nafisi's success in making connections between the two, as in: "What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven. This was what we had in common, although we were not aware of it then."