I did not read the selections this month. 
We opened a new business that occupied my time. I will try to be better next month.
Agree with all said so far about Reading Lolita in Tehran. I found myself on more than one occasion reading words while wool-gathering. I regrouped, reread, and realized that I missed little.
I read the Nayir Sharqi & Katya Hijazi series (I recommend the series.): fiction, Saudi Arabia rather than Iran. The author Zoe Ferraris moved to Saudi Arabia and lived in a conservative Muslim community with her then-husband and his family, a group of Saudi-Palestinians. In truth, I got more from these books than I did from Nafisi’s nonfiction. In many instances they trod the same territory but Nafisi’s version frustrated me. It lacked … something …
And it bugged the heck out me every time she mentioned “my magician” - just a personal scrape-of-fingernails-on-chalkboard for me.
Such a meaty list of discussion questions! I have finished both selections. I read Reading Lolita in Tehran after it was first published. This time around, I listened to it (I also have a hard copy for reference) read in the beautiful resonant voice of Lisette Lecat and it felt much warmer. For Persepolis, I read the first book in the series and watched the excellent movie version that covers Marji’s life well into adulthood.
I knew what to expect with Nafisi’s work since this was my second go with it. Since the first time, however, I’ve now read the four authors’ works she refers to most frequently. Although I don’t agree with her points of view on some–especially Gatsby being all about the American dream–I appreciated Reading Lolita in Tehran more because of being familiar with her referenced selections.
I too want to know more about the book club meetings. I’ve also had a non-stop craving for “pastry”, coffee, and walnuts 
D just read Persepolis for IB English…I’ll have to pick it up!
Let us know if it’s anything we can buy online. 
That bothered me, too. The nickname was never fully explained (at least not that I recall) and it struck me as somehow flirtatious or coy.
I think this is an important key to enjoying the book. I perked up when she discussed books I’d read (The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice) and tended to do more “wool-gathering,” as ignatius put it, whenever she discussed books I hadn’t read.
The film glosses over the incredibly painful difficulties that Satrapi experienced at the beginning of her time in Europe. I’ll admit that this is only peripherally related to Iran, but I think it illustrates the price she had to pay for her “escape” and introduction to a different world.
I could have written Mary’s original post. That description of Reading Lolita is also what I remember from the reviews that made me want to read it when it first came out. Once I realized that I was going to have to enjoy the book she wrote not the one I wish she had written, I found it better. Amusingly I ran into a friend who just hated it, and thought the author was full of herself for not writing more about the book club. Isn’t all memoir sort of a selfish act? I thought her viewpoints on the various books were interesting - quite different from what I feel the average English class gives you here - though as it happens the books I’ve read that she discusses I didn’t read in school. Not even Gatsby. 
Nevertheless, I found the timeline extremely confusing and I didn’t think her students became real people at all. And I agree “magician” must have other connetations in Persian, because it was like nails on a blackboard to me too.
I liked* Persepolis* a lot. I thought she did a lot of interesting things with the drawings when telling the story. She often switched to a more realistic style when drawing the results of the bombing, while the bombing itself will be dominated by black scary almost abstract patterns. I loved her rich upper-class Marxist family. I met a lot of that type in Europe doing summer language studies. I used to shock them by saying “But I am bourgeois!” when they said, “How bourgeouis!” as a put-down. I had not really realized that the Iranian revolution happened because both the leftists and the religious right were both trying to take down the Shah. (Nor that the Shah was really a nobody and so much a puppet of the West.)
I read the second * Persepolis* and thought it very much worth reading - and yes, it does show that sending Marji off to Europe was not necessarily such a great solution.
I’ve read the first few chapters of * Lolita* again. Nabokov sure is a master stylist, but I’m not sure I can take being in HH’s company again. I’m thinking of reading * Invitation to a Beheading* which she also discusses a lot.
Me either. That was one of the things I appreciated learning from the book.
When my son spent a semester in Italy in an arts program, he was struck by the Marxist orientation of some of the teachers and teachings. It was one of the things that gave him a sense of Europe being different from the US.
Oh yes. I spent a gap year in France and my history teacher used to regularly say, “I am not a communist, but I think the Marxist interpretation of these events is correct.” It was definitely interesting to get a different POV.
I kept up with the Iranian Revolution as it happened. My next-door neighbor/good friend’s husband was Iranian with his family still living in Iran. I learned details at the time, such as their marriage recorded on his birth certificate - a way to tell the difference between a marriage for green card purposes vs. love. When her husband become a U.S. citizen both she and he had to have their pictures taken for Iranian persona non grata purposes. She laughed (though with a tad of frustration) that she had to be so covered in her photograph that no one would have an inkling it was she, should she decide to waltz into Iran. However, family visits took place in Turkey as no one cared to push their luck. He was quite worried about pushback during the time of the Iran hostage crisis, even going so far as to removing their name - obviously Iranian - from their mailbox.
mathmom: I’m with your friend. I thoroughly disliked the book and, since it is a memoir, I guess it fair to say I thoroughly dislike its author.
Way back in the early 70s, a guy who was a friend of a friend of mine had a job in Iran for a while, working on one of the projects the Shah was pouring money into at the time.
Later, in the mid-70s (still the Shah era), there was an Iranian student in a college class I took. She was very worried about all the repression in her country. It was summer (a summer ecology class) and one day, when we went on a field trip, the Iranian girl said, “What’s that smell? It smells like opium poppies.” We said, “No, no, it can’t be,” and she replied that it certainly was similar to the opium poppy smell that was common in the countryside back home.
I’m not as critical of “Reading Lolita” as many of you. First, I enjoyed the debate about Lolita’s captivity from the point of view of women who themselves are being held captive by a repressive regime that wants to curtail their lives, their forms of self-expression and possibly their very freedom. I relished reading how they all pushed the boundaries imposed upon them while trying to stay safe, and I liked reading about the politics at her university.
Persepolis is wonderful. I don’t “do” graphic novels, so I was struck how effective and compelling it can be as literature.
Yes, I think so – which makes me wonder if it is Azar Nafisi who rubs me the wrong way or the genre itself.
The other issue with any memoir is how much to believe. Is the author being completely honest? Has the truth been embellished? The line between truth and fiction is especially blurred in Reading Lolita in Tehran because much of the story is, by necessity, fictionalized–as the author openly admits:
If the characters are disguised “perhaps even from themselves,” that suggests a significant departure from the truth. I think Nafisi created a memoir that must be approached in the same way that she advised approaching fiction:
I agree! Persepolis was the first graphic novel I ever read. For some reason, in a house full of books, graphic novels never made it on to our shelves. I just checked Persepolis 2 out of the library, but haven’t started it yet.
Memoirs can be great: West With the Night, Out of Africa, Walden, Autobiography of Malcolm X, Liars’ Club, Just Kids, etc, etc, etc.
I like the “epiphany of truth” comment of Nafisi’s quoted by Mary above. Memoirists like Beryl Markham, Isak Dineson, Patti Smith, etc, leave a lot out, but you still get a strong sense of their stories and their lives.
Warning: I found Persepolis 2 such a let-down after loving Persepolis. I still loved the graphic novel format. Satrapi, away from Iran and family, has a difficult coming-of-age. Satrapi’s tale follows the same path as many difficult coming-of-age stories do: sex, drugs, unhappiness. Difficult teen years become the focus.
But she (Satrapi) never blames anyone. She’s not a whiner. Nafisi kind of is.
I don’t read a lot of memoirs and biographies. My favorite of all time is probably Vera Brittain’s *Testament of Youth *and Winston Churchill’s My Early Life is a lot of fun, as is both of Roald Dahl’s books Boy and Solo. I haven’t read any of the newer more confessional ones.
Nafisi doesn’t really let you get to know her or her students. But I do think some of her literary analysis was interesting.
I also love memoirs, in fact, Nabokov’s “Speak Memory” ranks as one of my all top favorites; I like it more than any of his fiction - and I really like his fiction!
Agree on both counts.
@katliamom, thanks for the recommendation of Speak Memory.
Mary13 asked some major questions, r.e. What should fiction accomplish?
Any thoughts?
I’ll take a stab at it… for me, fiction - more specifically the novel - is the personification of an idea/ideas. Great novels pose great questions (with varying degrees of subtlety) and then try to show the answers through the lives of their characters. In these answers we find portrayals of entire societies and the reflection of individual psyches, we also find contradictions, anger, wit, horror – and often, a lack of resolution. (The latter in particular in modern fiction.)
For me, the ideas behind the novel should be like a backbone: there, but unseen at first glance. What we should be seeing primarily are the people and places that personify these ideas. By getting to know the characters and understanding their struggles, we slowly discover the ideas. But the human drama has to be the primary attraction, otherwise, the author might as well just write philosophy, not fiction.
I might not want to be BFFs with Professor Nafisi, but I would like to sit in on a few of her lectures.