I’d recommend Persepolis as far more enjoyable and accessible, but I’d also recommend Reading Lolita in Tehran because it was a big bestseller that was also controversial and contains some interesting literary criticism.
I’d recommend both, but Reading Lolita with caveats. I started * Maus*. It’s got a great voice, Spiegelman really captures the way his father speaks, but I find the illustrations less appealing. They are too busy and too the same for me. Very text heavy panels. Less visually interesting.
To the third question, about how requiring of the veil is treated in both books. I loved Satrapi’s picture of the little kids both take wearing the veil in stride and make it a plaything and try to see what they can get away with. She makes it clear how many levels of conformance there can be in her picture: https://blogs.stockton.edu/postcolonialstudies/files/2011/04/veil-1.jpg And I like that Nafisi’s grandmother’s agency is taken away from her by making her choice to wear the veil a requirement.
It occurs to me that Satrapi must be very close in age to Nafisi’s students. I don’t think she (nor Sanaz, Nassrin, Azin and the rest of the girls) are part of a “generation with no past.”
I agree. The “girls” do not share Nafisi’s past but they have one. Of course, the girls have a past. Nafisi discounts it because it differs from hers. Nafisi’s certitude bothered me throughout the book.
Earlier I mentioned Ferraris’ mystery trilogy that takes place in Saudi Arabia. In it I caught the frustration of the lack of peripheral vision when wearing a chador or burka. I gleaned that male companions sometimes have difficulty recognizing a wife/relative among others all dressed alike, so look to the purse for help. In the second book in the trilogy, an American wife - not used to wearing a chador - turns clumsy, tripping and once losing it behind her in a revolving door. I like how the author remains respectful - a main character is a devout Muslim male. He also navigates rules and regulations. By the third book, he’s a man in love - already declaring his intentions to Katya’s father. He sets up a fan on his houseboat so that when she visits (with chaperone) she won’t get too hot in her chador. Little details but sometimes it’s the little details that make or break a book.
What NJTM said:
Having the nuanced drawings and story told from a young girl’s less jaded point of view made Persepolis more compelling and experiential. Nafisi’s writing appealed to my adult western brain. The two books were very complimentary, imo.
Nice little article about traveling in Iran:
Something nagged at me about the nickname “the magician.” I found it on pages 33-34:
I don’t know that it fully explains the nickname but definitely hints at its origins.
Good find, ignatius! For what it’s worth, the nickname did not bother me at all.
^ Thank you, ignatius! I had missed that entirely. Apparently, there is no such story by Nabokov. I guess that’s what Nafisi means by, “What I did not tell Yassi that day was that Nabokov’s magician, the man who was as dangerous to the state as an armed rebel, did not exist - or, at least, not in fiction.” I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting that correctly, so I googled the title and found this on Yahoo Answers:
I understand the importance of speaking in code in repressive societies, but isn’t it against the teacher version of the Hippocratic Oath to just make stuff up and pass it along to your students as fact? Maybe I’m overly sensitive because I’m married to a teacher… 
Teacher version of the Hippocratic Oath – LOL.
Literature from repressive societies is filled with this kind of trickery. Also, it’s very Nabokovian, whose work is full of tricks.
Nafisi looks at it this way:
I guess this goes along with her image of the women in her book club as “her girls.”
Anyway, Nafisi mentions her magician early, ends her narrative with him, and then picks him up in her epilogue. The role he plays equals that of the book club. I never did quite grasp the relationship: mentor, friend, critic … whatever … it’s fair to say that she has him placed firmly on a pedestal.
Or, maybe, the magician is simply an imaginary foil
^^^ Maybe … Nafisi writes this in the epilogue:
I was so sure that they were going to have a sexual relationship! He’s clearly important to Nafisi’s narrative, but I have to admit I never quite grokked it.
^^^ I ran across this in a review of Nafisi’s book: Things I’ve Been Silent About
Maybe this answers why we have trouble with her magician. Nafisi gives us glimpses of a relationship that hints at something more but then pulls away. Mary used the words “flirtatious” and “coy” when mentioning Nafisi’s talk of her magician. mathmom figured they would be lovers. Lovers occurred to me but I hesitated to jump to that conclusion. So Nafisi admitting to practicing open marriage with her husband puts her magician squarely into lover category for me. His role in her life in RLIT no longer feels as confusing, though I still believe she has him on a pedestal.
^That makes sense. The episode where she feared he had been arrested and taken away was certainly a memorable one.
It does make sense. And in that context, the fact that Nafisi arranges for her husband to pick her up at the magician’s apartment after one of their “appointments” is just a little too weird for me: “I had an appointment with him that afternoon, after which Bijan would pick me up and take me to a friend’s house for dinner” (p. 226).
Oh well, chacun à son goût! ¯_(ツ)_/¯
One of my in-laws has an open marriage. I find it hard to comprehend, but he and his partner have been together forever and married for as long as they’ve been allowed to be married. It seems to work for them.
Anyway, I do agree that a lot makes more sense if he is her lover and not just someone she talks books with. There’s too much emotional involvement hinted at for much else to seem reasonable. At least to me.
I want to touch on these two questions because they highlight how Marjane Satrapi’s approach differs from Azar Nafisi’s view that her students were part of a “generation with no past” (a view that mathmom and ignatius nicely refute in posts #101 and #102).
Through acknowledging and re-telling family stories, Satrapi’s characters and their complicated history really came to life for me. Her memoir seems more cathartic than Nafisi’s, putting me in mind of the Isak Dinesen quote, “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.”
I agree that empathy is an essential and powerful element of storytelling, and this is an area in which Satrapi and Nafisi share a similar perspective. From a 2008 interview with Satrapi:
In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi writes about novels:
If anyone has any ideas for the next book we should “inhale,” feel free to start mentioning them!
^Nice observations, Mary. Yes! Empathy! That’s what’s fiction’s for.
I saw a review of a novel that looks good: The Dig by John Preston.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/books/review/the-dig-by-john-preston.html?_r=0
I’m good with it. (Am I easy or what!?!)