Reading in Tehran

Last night I completed Reading Lolita in Tehran. A friend has recommended it, and another friend loaned me a copy. I found it a fascinating, if sad and sobering, reflection of life under Iran's Islamo-fascist regime. I am glad I read it for the insight I gained into the personal lives of those surviving the revolution in Iran, and for broadening my understanding of Islam in general, and radical elements of Islam in particular. And any good book should help us to live through new eyes and see lives that are not our own. I'm sure Dr. Nafisi would be pleased that even I, who disagree with her on many counts, found her book to do that for me.

There were a few things I found irritating about Dr. Nafisi's book. First, she speaks in glowing, nostalgic terms of her idealistic Marxist days, seemingly making no connection between this idealistic Marxist rhetoric and the realities of the Revolution. Secondly, her feminist and almost deconstructive criticism of the authors and their works was sometimes a little hard for me to take. Most of the authors mentioned (Nabakov, Fitzgerald, James) I have not read extensively, so I cannot disagree strongly with her... though most of those authors choose a pathway to telling a story that I find either unhelpful or distasteful, and so I haven't much enjoyed what I have read by them. The final author discussed, however, I have more familiarity with (Jane Austen). Her critical take on Austen seemed pretty politically correct to me, and not necessarily illuminating or helpful. And thirdly, the contemporary, abbreviated style, using punctuation quite loosely, and jettisoning most quotation marks so one can't always tell when speakers change, I found a mild irritant.

All that aside, it was a fascinating memoir of intermingled history, autobiography, and books.

Concurrent with reading the book, I came across several other articles that seemed to feed into what I was learning about Iran. Michael Ledeen wrote an interesting piece that was covered, in part, in Imprimus. Understanding Iran dove-tailed nicely with what I reading, as have several articles in the current issue of World Magazine. (See Stalked and if you have the print version, look at Alisa Harris' article entitled "Talk Is Cheap".)

Waiting in the wings for further reading on this type of subject is The Kite Runner, but I think I'll take a little break from Islamic Studies until after the holidays.