Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

During my last semester at BYU I took a Women's Studies class that was absolutely amazing. The professor was a very intelligent and inspiring woman who I really admired. She split our class into groups and assigned us books to read and present to the rest of the class. When one of the other groups presented this book I thought it sounded really interesting and have been wanting to read it ever since.

Here is a review by Random House:

"For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Azar Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. 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. 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.

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. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum.

Azar 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. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice."

I thought this book sounded insteresting is because it is an insider's perspective of what life was like in Iran (especially for women) during the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and in the Islamic Republic of Iran in general. I admit I don't know much about the the recent politics of the Middle Eastern countries, but I'm hoping that reading this book will add a little more understanding and perspective to the current situation in that part of the world.