Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir
Azar Nafisi
published 2003
384 pages
In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, an Iranian teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and “shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color.” In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading.
