Literature professor Nafisi returned to her native Iran after a long education abroad, remained there for some 18 years, and left in 1997 for the United States, where she now teaches at Johns Hopkins. The ayatollahs don’ t know it, but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic.This book transcends categorization as memoir, literary criticism or social history, though it is superb as all three. It is at once a celebration of the power of the novel and a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women who must meet in secret to explore the forbidden fiction of the West. “Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense.Īzar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading-Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita-their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular several had spent time in jail. They were all former students whom she had taught at university.

This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true.įor two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. We all have dreams-things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi