Review of Reading Lolita in Tehran

Just finished reading Dr. Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. I had bought the book years ago when it first came out. It was the middle of the semester, so I put it on my shelf to read later. Somehow it was pushed to the back of the shelf in my office. Well, it showed up again in the move to Tallahassee and I am so thankful that it did. It is a real treasure. If you want to read a story about the resilience of young women facing an uncompromising, totalitarian revolution, this is the book for you. The young women you meet – Azin, Nassrin, Mahshid, Manna, Sanaz, Mitra, and Yassi – are tragic and heroic. If you want to read a book that gives you a firsthand view of the first 18 years of the Iranian Revolution from the perspective of an Iranian female literature professor who was educated in the west, this is the book for you. If you are a fan of classic western literature by Austen, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, James, Joyce, Conrad and others and how their novels can speak to the human condition even today and can enlighten us, this is the book for you. Once I started reading the book, I couldn’t put it down…