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What it argues
Azar Nafisi spent years teaching literature at universities in Tehran before the restrictions on what she could teach — and who she could teach — became intolerable. Reading Lolita in Tehran is her memoir of that period, structured around the secret book club she ran in her home after resigning, where seven of her former female students gathered weekly to read banned Western novels: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, Austen.
The book is organized in four sections, each named for one of the authors read in the group — Lolita, Gatsby, James, Austen. Nafisi moves between the text discussions and the students' individual lives: their families' compromises and resistances under the Islamic Republic, their complicated relationships with the veil, their marriages and escapes and stays. The books they read function less as subjects for literary analysis and more as mirrors, provocations, and evidence that a fuller human life is possible.
What it gets right
- 1.
Literature functions differently under totalitarianism than under freedom. When the state controls what is real and what is permitted, fiction becomes one of the few spaces where genuine moral complexity can be encountered.
- 2.
The veil, for Nafisi and her students, was not primarily a religious symbol but a political imposition — a mechanism for erasing individual identity in public space.
- 3.
Nabokov's Lolita is used to argue that the moral clarity of a narrative can exist independently of whether its narrator is reliable or even sympathetic.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Azar Nafisi was born in Tehran in 1955, the daughter of a former mayor of Tehran. She studied literature in the United States and England before returning to Iran, where she taught at the University of Tehran and Allameh Tabatabai University until her resignation in 1995. She emigrated to the United States in 1997. Reading Lolita in Tehran, published in 2003, spent over a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. She is a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and has written several subsequent books.
