The parallel/anology is certainly interesting - the author portrays her and her seven female students as Lolita the victim and the beauty, the Iranian Regime as Humbert Humbert the capitor and the rapist.
Of course I made the mistake of the conventional reader, who trusted the narrator and became sympathetic with him; but it's more complicated than what she described.
Love of the nymphet. It is not accepted by the society, but that's what drove Humbert Humbert to commit all the horrible crimes (both legal and emotional) against Lolita.
And this is where the analogy fails. I don't think she will agree that Ayatolla's regime did what it did to its citizens, especially its female citizens, out of "love".
Somehow I don't like the way she politicized everything they were doing in her home - reading literature is reading literature, does everything have to be so sumlime and so meaningful? Reading Lolita in Tehran, the title itself is very eye-catching - very commercialized, very sensational, and selling.
Am I being too harsh to her? Given my background, having experienced the pain of double-talk and self-censorship, I should have been more sympathetic.;))
--------------------------------------------------
http://www.powells.com/review/2003_05_27.html
Nafisi, who spent years in Norman, Oklahoma, and loves Mike Gold, Gatsby, and Häagen-Dazs (she has the habit of eating coffee ice cream topped with cold coffee and walnuts whenever she's nervous), has some secrets of her own, which are only teasingly revealed to the readers of her memoir. She, too, struggles with the question of whether to stay or leave, and for her this question sometimes seems to refer not only to the Islamic Republic but also to her husband. Periodically she visits a man whom she calls "my magician," with whom she shares books and ideas, coffee and chocolate. These interludes are the most romantically written sections of the book (she grants her magician the ability to read a person's character from the shape of his nose), yet one feels that the pragmatism that could never govern her political impulses has a strong hold on her family life.
There are certain books by our most talented essayists — I'm thinking in particular of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion, and Dakota, by Kathleen Norris — that, though not necessarily better than their other works, carry inside their covers the heat and struggle of a life's central choice being made and the price being paid, while the writer tells us about other matters, and leaves behind a path of sadness and sparkling loss. Reading Lolita in Tehran is such a book.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
while agreeing with you that her reading of lolita was very "distorted" and too politized, i, however,was indeed a little bit more sympathetic to her. i think one can't have a fair assessment of ordinary things in life (including literature) when the surroundings upset your foundamental belief.
otherwise, i was more interested in getting to know tehran and iranians through her book than how she interpreted those novels. btw, the few books she discussed must be extremely popular in iran during those years. i was introduced to a couple by an iranian friend way back.
enjoyed your blog! impressed by your productivity, too.
luguo.
I was actually the opposite - I took one semester of Persian (Farsi) at Graduate School. My teacher is an American woman, a Christian, a wealthy and "cultured" one at that, a feminist in its more benigh and positive sense. She, of course, has "gone native" in the Persian culture. The Iranian society and the position of women in that society are drastically different from what Nafisi described in her book.
I just discovered a paradox: when I read a book that claimed to be fictional, I actually believe everything in it is true; if a book claims to be telling a true story, I become suspicious of everything the author says, especially the author's intention.
The title of the book is too much a giveaway. It's too much a coincidence: Lolita can sell, Tehran can sell, Lolita in Tehran can sell even more. The reading part becomes less relevant, I'm afraid. :)
Not sure if you are coming back to read this; so I allow myself to be much more cynical than I actually am. :)))
you made good points. i wouldn't be able to tell because i knew next to nothing about iran. for me, this book is more a curiosity reading (bought at the airport for a long flight :-) and i kind of enjoy others talking about books i've read.
thanks!
luguo
Post a Comment