“Nafisi doesn’t really let you get to know her or her students” – I know – and I wondered whether that was on purpose, to protect them.
Or, maybe that’s one of the weaknesses of this work, and the reason so many of you had mixed feelings about ti.
I think what fiction should accomplish is putting you inside the minds of other people. Good memoirs do this too.
For me fiction first and foremost is about telling a story and creating characters. The big ideas are secondary and should not come at the expense of character. If I don’t believe in the characters and want to spend time with them - no matter how great the idea is or how beautifully written the words are - I don’t want to read it. I read a lot of sci fi and there’s nearly always a what if element there - some big idea - but they only work as novels for me if you see real people interacting with that what if.
I think short stories often skip real characterization all together for the idea (which is why I tend not to like them.) I think the best memoirs really put you in the head of their authors.
I had not thought that Nafisi might be protecting her students which is why despite her careful descriptions of them early on in the book, they somehow don’t quite gel. The annoying ones certainly are much more vivid than the ones on her side. I got rather fond of the guy who hated The Great Gatsby so much.
Maybe that’s it. Circumstances dictate that the author cannot write her characters as entirely fictional, nor as entirely factual. The result is kind of hazy. All the characters tended to run together for me, especially the “girls,” each with her terrible history, be it imprisonment, molestation, spousal abuse, or forced marriage.
Nafisi’s repeated use of “my girls” bothered me. I know that it is a term of affection, and there isn’t really a good substitute. I use the term myself for my grown daughters. So I understand why Nafisi uses the words. Nonetheless, I cringed each time, because these “girls” were trying to survive in a society that subjugated them in large and small ways. The authoritarian regime treated women as children, little girls unable to care for themselves. And Nafisi uses the word more than just as a term of endearment. She refers to a “fashionable girls’ college,” calls the section of her university classroom where the women sit, “the girls’ side,” etc.
In such a world—where a woman can be expelled for running in the halls at school!—I think every word matters and any possible opportunity to not identify women as “girls” should be seized. However, that’s just my opinion and clearly not Professor Nafisi’s—when a friend calls her on her use of the word “girls,” Nafisi bristles: “…she knew very well what I meant. Students, I said. Students! Get a life, woman” (p. 320).
Nafisi’s study group was talking about English-language literature. Were they speaking English most of the time during their meetings? I’m trying to remember whether this was addressed.
If so, maybe these young women used the word “girls” to refer to themselves and one another. If so, Nafisi it would have found it natural to use that word in her book.
I also wondered whether that might in part be coming out of something that is part of Iranian culture. I had a German friend who often referred to women as girls, but since he also called men boys, I never called him on it. I remember having a discussion there with someone about the use of Ms. I said that I preferred it since I don’t use my husband’s last name. They thought it was weird since there is no German equivalent. Adult women there tend to all be Frau, married or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A4ulein (Even more official than I realized!)
But I thought it was odd that since Hafisi was an English professor, and one who purported to care about words. (one of her favorite authors is Nabokov after all!), that she wouldn’t recognize that girls sounds belittling to many western ears.
^ Good points.
I wondered the same thing. The authors they were reading are difficult enough for native English speakers. Were Nafisi’s students reading works in translation or are most young Iranians fluent in English (both written and spoken)?
I’m sure they were reading the books in English, but I don’t know if the discussions were in English. Satrapi goes to a bi-lingual school where they spoke in French which I thought was interesting. I have a Lebanese-American friend who also attended a school where the primary language was French. So it may be something that the educated class did. (I’m not finding much about education before the revolution on line.)
In my experience once you have one foreign language down fluently the rest tend to come much more easily. Satrapi, also mentions having to learn Arabic.
I think when students in foreign countries read works of English literature they usually read them in English rather than in translation. For one thing, English is such a dominant language. For another thing, translations of some of the works may not even exist.
Nafisi’s students were unusual in their level of fluency. It could be that now, this many years after the Revolution, fewer students know English?
I found the following on Wikipedia about the teaching of English in Iran:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Iran#Foreign_languages
The main language of Iran is of course Persian, also called Farsi. Didn’t Nafisi mention translating some Farsi work into English in the book?
When I was in the hospital recently for some tests, I had a conversation with a Lebanese doctor who noticed I was reading Proust. He had gone to a French school in Lebanon and later studied at the Sorbonne. He had never read Proust, but at least he knew who Proust was!
I think I may be the only one who really enjoyed this book! Maybe it is because it’s my second time around with it. Reading Lolita this time accomplished what good fiction does for me: It transported me to another place, introduced me to new people, and suggested new ways to gain an iota of comprehension about life circumstances, especially in this case, so foreign to me. It also made me curious to know more about her and other women living in repressive environments. I bought a used copy of her follow-up to [i’Reading Lolita*, called The Republic of Imagination. Good fiction (and non-fiction) make me want to know more, or at the very least, read more of the original voice.
I had a lovely, gentle Persian female friend in a former life. She spoke of her life in Iran before the revolution and what it was like to go back after that event. I’m sure I’ve projected some of her onto Nafisi. Even her use of the term “girls” reminded me of my friend, a mother of two girls.
I also cut the author a lot of slack because it seemed her goal in telling of her experiences, her memoir, was to emphasize and relay how brutal, indeed terrifying it must have been to live through the revolution. How to understand the shift in roles of women under a regime? How different is that transformation from what I consider some repressive notions surfacing in our own western world? I wish I knew more about the other women of the book, but Nafisi’s story alone is pretty compelling. That she calls the book Reading Lolita and uses parallels to Humbert Humbert’s psychological domination of the young girl, gave me a way to get a bit of a grasp.
To wit: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2014/9/25/talk-with-polyglot/
(It’s a little off-topic from our book discussion, but it’s cool…and Doner does say in another article in the Washington Post that Persian is his favorite language. 
)
I agree with this 100%. Although I wasn’t a big fan of the author’s tone or writing style, the book did immerse me in a world that I knew very little about (I’m embarrassed to admit). I read Reading Lolita in Tehran before Persepolis. In hindsight, I think I should have done it the other way around. I would have been less impatient with (and confused by) Nafisi’s structure if I had the history of the revolution, as told by Satrapi, already laid out before me in a clearer fashion.
PlantMom, can you expand upon that a bit? What new ways?
(Anyway, do let us know what you think of The Republic of Imagination!)
I also appreciated how Reading Lolita… provided insight into the culture level of a certain segment of Iranian society. Of course, there was some of that in Persepolis too.
Back in 2003 (much closer to 9/11), an acquaintance of mine was ranting and raving about how horrible Iran is, and made the comment, “Outside of Tehran, that country is completely backward, culturally.”
I didn’t know how to convince the woman that this could not possibly be true, but based on reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, I knew it wasn’t.
I can’t remember exactly when it was that we used to still have a Borders bookstore around here that I liked and would browse in, but I remember that there was a point in time when I was startled to stumble upon more than one memoir by Iranian immigrant woman, all of which seemed to address the topic of “my country, then and now.”
Probably somewhere online there is a list of those memoirs!
Here you go – this was written in 2004, probably around the time you made your observation: http://www.iranchamber.com/culture/articles/iranian_women_contemporary_memoirs.php
Thanks, Mary! I also found this:
http://www.mahditourage.com/files/tourage-reviewessay_1_.pdf
This article discusses how Nafizi has been accused of being “a cultural agent of the neocons”:
One of the fun things about having a long-time book club is finding connections between books we’ve read that seemingly have nothing to do with one another. Those who read Station Eleven might remember that the novel’s epigraph was an excerpt from a poem by Czeslaw Milosz. At the time, we talked about how his poetry focuses on spiritual survival in a destroyed world. So I was pleasantly surprised to find Milosz to be the author of the epigraph of Reading Lolita in Tehran as well:
During our Station Eleven discussion, we had also talked about a quote from Milosz’s book, The Captive Mind: “The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those works are worthwhile which can preserve their validity even for a man threatened with instant death.”
Thinking about how this quote also applies to the events in Reading Lolita in Tehran, I looked up Czeslaw Milosz again and found this interesting article by the late Christopher Hitchens, in which he discusses Milosz’s perspective on how intellectuals survive under totalitarianism, and more specifically, the way the poet’s words beautifully complement *Reading Lolita in Tehran/i: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/08/the_captive_mind_now.html
The Hitchens article is interesting, but I think he misrepresents Nafizi a bit when he calls her “a radical who opposed the Shah” and says that she was driven from the university by Khomeini’s goons.
I’m glad to know others disliked this book, and even the author. I’m struggling to finish the last 100 pages., and the last few links posted above solidify my feelings.
I felt Nafisi’s book was a bit of propaganda- and now I’m reading about her support from neocons- wolfawitz and others.
I can not trust the views of the daughter of the mayor of Tehran- whose grandmother was one of first female politicians, and who was educated in elite boarding schools in Europe-
She should have attempted to explore the historical events in some context as mentioned in this article.
http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/10/29/book_clubbed/?page=full