Reading Lolita in Tehran – Book Review (sort of)

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all: - Oscar Wilde.

This is not a book review as such, after recently posting a review of a book titled How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, a tongue in cheek review of a tongue in cheek book based on the proposition of philosopher Jaques Derrida that books are about ideas more than narrative, plot and language,some comments expressed shock at the notion, though the common practice of reviewing books without having actually read them is the worst kept secret in the world of literature.

I was challenged to review this difficult book without having read it. Have I succeeded? That is for you to decide.

There are some book titles so unlikely one must wonder how the book came to be written. If there is a listing of such books Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Terhan must surely be close to the top. Why, we might ask while browsing the book store's non - fiction shelves, would anybody who wants to stay attached to their body parts risk reading Lolita in Iran in order to write such a book?

For Nafisi, who left Iran on 1997, it was an act of defiance; a quiet, personal protest against an oppressive regime and the subjugation of women in a society controlled by a harsh, patriarchal religion. After being fired or resigning in frustration from posts in several universities where she had taught literature the author invited seven of her best and most trusted students to study in her own home literature forbidden by the theocratic regime.. The personal risk involved for all of them was that they might pay the ultimate price but Nafizi herself had to consider that retribution against her as instigator might well extend to other family members.

The books the group studied seem surprisingly innocuous to end up being considered decadent and immoral enough to be banned, the list including Henry James' Daisy Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby, Nabokov's Lolita, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary and , the Arabic folk tales of Sheherazad and the Thousand and One Nights. What all of these have in common in the eyes of the Tehran regime) is they deal with independent women who take control of their own lives.

If the Mullahs see danger in Jane Austen's prissy, empty headed heroines and their obsession with finding rich husbands, what would they make of the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell whose female characters are far stronger than their men, cope with adversity without having an attack of the vapours and actually rebel against male authority. But then Gaskell was from the North of England, like the Brontes (and your huble reviewer as you may have guessed.)

Setting aside the issues Iran's regime has with women who want to think for themselves, it is worth remembering the role literature has played elsewhere in the resistance against totalitarian regimes. The underground networks that circulated Samizdat novels in Soviet Russia spring to mind for this was how the works of Alexander Solzenheitzen came to the attention of the outside world.

There were similar underground networks circulating literature the regimes would have considered seditious in Nazi Germany, South Africa during the Apartheid era and in Burma, China and many other countries under authoritarian rule today. When we consider the importance of literature in this light, it is ironic is it not that certain free world governments that like to use grandiose rhetoric when promoting the imposition of their own version of freedom and democracy in other nations have pursued social policies that marginalise and demonise intellectualism in the nation they rule.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is however a book about much more that the effect forbidden western literature has on young Muslim women, unaccustomed to being expected to have their own opinion let alone asked to express it. It is about the conspiratorial bond that develops between the protagonists and the changes their personalities undergo as a result of exposure to the ideas contained in the books and to each other.

Reticent and apprehensive at first, Nafisi's pupils gradually begin to gain confidence and open up, gaining confidence in themselves, their teacher and the small number of people who must be trusted to guard their secret. Hesitantly they escape from the oppression of the Islamic republic to the true democratic republic of the mind, to a small place where freedom of speech means freedom to express forbidden thoughts.

One's thoughts naturally turn to the Greek drama Lysistrata In Aristophanes' comedy the women of Sparta and Corinth bring to an end the Peleponnesian war simply by witholding sex. No wonder the Abrahamic religions control their women so rigidly and distrust liberal literature. What a weapon women possess.

I am hedging around the central question of course? Why does the book's title highlight Lolita? We have enough background to tackle it now though.

Though many highly regarded figures in the world of literature eulogise Nabokov I think Lolita is one of the worst books I ever read. To write of the beauty and precision of Nabokov's difficult (some including me world say pedestrian) prose, as critics usually do, is really to say he is a bad writer. Nabokov's books read like you would expect a novel produced by a committee of minor government officials to read. And the plot is no more than the self indulgent fantasising of a sleaze merchant. OK, I'm a maverick, I love Kafka though.

The Iranian mindset is different to that of the west however and an Iranian would not see where the problem lay in a middle aged man having a relationship with a teenage girl for that is exactly what occurs in many arranged marriages. What drew Nafisi and her group to Lolita is that they saw in the way Humbert Humbert takes control of his stepdaughter's life and her identity which they read as being symbolic of how the regime and the patriarchal social structure takes control of women's lives in Islamic society.

Dd I mention my agreement with the view that books are mainly about the transmissdion of ideas?

That it is Lolita who initiates the sexual relationship in the story is not seen as contradictory in the Islamic world. It is always the woman who is to blame; only recently in Saudi Arabia which has a totalitarian monarch who runs an Islamist regime, a woman was sentenced to two hundred lashes for wantonly herself to be gang raped by seven men. And a decade ago a group of schoolgirls fleeing a burning building were beaten back into the flames by the religious police. The girls were unfortunate enough to live in a society that preferred they die an agonising death than dishonour their fathers by being seen in the street with their hair uncovered.

Perhaps my liberal, bohemian lifestyle has not equipped me to appreciate Lolita.

The Tehran guerrilla readers certainly did and they responded well to Nobokov's other works, particularly liking his use of the Russian word "poshlust" which means not simply trashy, the normal translation, but more accurately, falsely beautiful or falsely important. It is a concept we in the west would do well to find a word for, because much of what is passed off as having value, the cod philosophy of self help book writers for example or the "cultural value" of fads in popular music falls under that umbrella.

Though the book came to be written due to the political situation under the priestly dictatorship of the Ayatollahs it is no polemic, nor is it an analysis of a political philosophy. The reading group begins its literary odessy with One Thousand And One Nights but little further attention is paid to the three thousand year old (at least) Persian tradition; instead the focus is on western books and the ideas they contain and on the political atmosphere in which those books are being read. Pages are devoted to commenting on a project to translate the writings of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeni to English with special attention to the bit in which the mad Mullah sanctions sex with animals as a way of keeping men's appetites under control.

Such material is wildly humorous but at the same time deeply tragic.

Azar Nafisi's book works at two parallel levels, first as an exploration of the minds of intelligent middle - class women living under a system in which the nature of their gender is seen as the evil that stands between men and God, and secondly as a personal memoir of a woman determined she will not bow to the pressure to conform.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is beautifully and compellingly written but slow and at times heavy going, it could not be recommended as light reading for a vacation. Having said that however, the writer's handling of the English language is more reader friendly than that of Nabokov. To those who support the spreading of liberal ideology and the feminist agenda, who have an interest in middle eastern affairs or are simply inspired by the idea of women subverting the supremacy of paternalistic authority, it will reward abundantly the effort required to read it.