Just finished Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Looked at the hostile Amazon.com reviews in addition to the Post's attack. One question immediately popped into mind, pace Karl Vick.
If things are looking so good in Iran, why exactly is Azar Nafisi's book not available in Tehran bookstores? Is it being censored? Vick doesn't tell us. But I would guess, after reading Nafisi's superb memoir cum manifesto cum confession-- for she was among the crowd chanting "Death to America!" outside the US Embassy in 1979, before the Islamist fundamentalists started mass killings of their communist co-conspirators--that if the book is not officially banned, then publishers in Iran are afraid to translate it. And I can understand why some of the Amazon.com readers are offended (especially the ones who admit they have not read Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James or Austen).
First, because Nafisi basically says Islamist "holy men" are child molesters, making an analogy between Nabokov's Humbert Humbert and Islamic weddings between middle-aged men and nine-year old girls.
Second, she holds out the American dream as an Iranian dream, thus siding with the Great Satan against the Ayatollahs, using Gatsby as a model.
Third, because she points out thei impossibility of escaping from reality through literature. In fact, literature is an intensification of reality, through empathy and individual experience. For this, Henry James is an example. I did not know, for example, that he became a British propagandist during World War I, referring to a "crash of civilizations" between Germany and England. And renouncing his US citizenship to become a British subject, in protest against American neutrality in the early stages of the conflict.
Finally, Nafisi cites Jane Austen as a novelist of democracy--whose commitment to reason overcomes blind passion. To her democracy is a dialog, based on individual sympathy and empathy. Not blindly following custom and convention, but fulfilling individual destiny often against society's expectations. Well, having read Mansfield Park not too long ago (see below), I couldn't agree more with Nafisi's interpretation.
What is so interesting is that there is possibly some sort of anti-Nafisi backlash brewing out there, perhaps among her former Marxist comrades, embarrassed that they quote Iranian revolutionaries agreeing to take the veil to defeat American Imperialism. Or justifying various compromises and hypocrisies. Or, perhaps, that she reveals the Islamist fundamentalists, when pressed, sacrificed true religious faith to the idols of political power, saying that the woman's veil was "just a piece of cloth."
As Americans are being blown up by suicide bombers following the example of Ayatollah Khomeni's martyrs, Nafisi's book is more relevant than ever. It is about why literature is much bigger than politics, and why totalitarians and apologists of all stripes are therefore threatened by any true voice of an individual.
What more can I say? If you haven't read it, read it this summer. Plus, it will give you a whole new perspective on Jane Austen's Emma...
