Copyright Jan Steckel, 2003. First appeared in Affaire de Coeur, November/December 2003.
A bit of powder on the cheeks, a stray hair escaping from a scarf, running up the stairs to make a class on time—under increasingly harsh religious laws, any of these can trigger punishments (including jail or flogging) for women at the University of Tehran. When Azar Nafisi, a female Iranian professor of English Literature, is expelled from the university for refusing to wear the veil, she forms a secret book club in her home with seven of her favorite female students. There, while discussing such decadent and subversive classics of Western literature as Nabokov's Lolita and the works of Henry James, Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nafisi and her young protegées explore their own lives through the life of the imagination, and the meaning of literature and art in a totalitarian society. Meanwhile, Nafisi depends for her own guidance on a mysterious man, a Tehran intellectual she identifies only as “my magician.” If she makes the difficult decision to emigrate to the United States, will she ever hear from her magician again?
This nonfiction tale has a few problems with repetition and unclear chronology. The author occasionally sounds self-aggrandizing, and the opacity with which she treats her relationship with her husband Bijan can be frustrating for the reader. Despite its minor faults, however, the work is a tour de force of memoir, feminist manifesto and literary criticism. If you want to appreciate your freedom to read, read Reading Lolita in Tehran.