In the early stages of the book, both high and mass Western culture allow the young women to establish selves that the Iranian – Islamic – world disallows. As the women become more confident in themselves, they wear lipstick, nailpolish and jeans. Only on entering Nafisiʼs house, she says, and removing their outer robes, did each student ʻgain … an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable selfʼ. Nafisiʼs book establishes early on that what is at stake for the young women who join her to read Lolita is the possibility of establishing a sense of individual identity, otherwise impossible (apparently) in the Islamic Revolutionary State of Iran. Each of the four chapters of the book is built around the discussion of work by a canonical Western writer: Nabokovʼs Lolita, Fitzgeraldʼs The Great Gatsby, Jamesʼs Daisy Miller and Washington Square, and Austenʼs Pride and Prejudice.
#PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS SONG SUICIDE SERIES#
But what kind of reading practices is the book describing and encouraging, and what reading practices are being declared significant intellectual engagements with literature, and with Iran, in this positioning of Nafisiʼs book? Reading Lolita in Tehran tells the story of Nafisi herself and a small group of Iranian women who joined her once a week, after she resigned her job at the University of Allameh Tabatabai, for private discussion classes on a series of Great Works of the Western canon. As a choice for incoming first-year students, Nafisiʼs book seems compelling because, as a reviewer from the New York Times is quoted on the cover as saying, it is an ʻeloquent brief on the transformative powers of fictionʼ. Clearly, it offers a message that ʻresonatesʼ for a significant portion of the US – and world – reading publics.
Translated into thirty-two languages, it has remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years. It has also been immensely popular with book clubs, library organizations and the like. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness Reading Lolita in Tehran in Connecticut Simon hayĪzar Nafisiʼs bestselling Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House, 2003) has become a popular choice for required summer reading for incoming students at many colleges and universities across the USA, including my own.
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