Book review...

BOOK: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi, 2003.

In light of the recent protests in Iran, which have gone from the issue of the election to the greater issue of freedom, rights, and treatment of people, one interesting book is "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi (2003). The author, who eventually flees to America, was an English professor in Iran who finally quit her job, unwilling to accept the ongoing restrictions on education and social life that was imposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini (the first Iranian ayatollah leader) and the Islamic republic's theocratic rule.

Then, as a very dangerous act at the time, she began conducting secret book-club reading sessions for some of her women students in her home. The women read "subversive" books by Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And another book was "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov.

Now, I have long followed the arguments by American professors of English about the value and quality of the book "Lolita." In some classes, I have shown the opening scene from the two movie versions of "Lolita," in order to contrast how movies have become more provocative. As you can imagine, the presentation of sexuality in the 1990s version is more explicit than the 1950s version, though the first one was the more controversial because of the times. I also wondered what we, as readers or watchers, were supposed to learn because the story is quite awful, a story about a middle-aged pedophile who obsesses over and eventually rapes a 12-year-old girl. To this day, it is controversial book in America, let alone in Iran and the other dictatorships of the Middle East.

So, I was intrigued that author Nafisi put "Lolita" in the title of her book. Nafisi wrote, "Teaching in the Islamic Republic, like any other vocation, was subservient to politics and subject to arbitrary rules. Always, the joy of teaching was marred by diversions and considerations forced on us by the regime--how well could one teach when the main concern of university officials was not the quality of one's work but the color of one's lips, the subversive potential of a single strand of hair? Could one really concentrate on one's job when what preoccupied the faculty was how to excise the word 'wine' from a Hemingway story, when they decided not to teach Bronte because she appeared to condone adultery?"

In the novel "Lolita," the pedophile Humbert obsesses over the girl. In Iran, the regime with its clergy as leaders obsesses over Iranian women. The women can't show hair strands because that tempts men. The women can't wear lipstick because that tempts men. On and on and on, women can't because of what it will do to them, the men. Obsession.

In the novel, the pedophile Humbert also rapes Lolita. Does the Iranian Islamic government "rape" figuratively (or, in some cases, literally, because of the male-dominated dogma and discriminatory laws) the women of Iran by denying them freedom and equality? That's a dangerous comparison for an Iranian author to make, but I think it is accurate as we see the restrictive and brutal actions of the Iranian government and its Baiji thugs.

Nafisi confuses me a little when she says in the book that Humbert and Lolita aren't meant to represent a country or regime or society or women, but then, in more recent TV interviews, she says that's exactly what they represent. I think the latter is correct, probably because the former was stated within the book at a publication time when any author might wonder if such statements could lead to bounty retribution, as was the case for novelist Salmon Rushdie.

Obsession seems most likely part of the rule of law there, as the Iranian regime wants to turn its people into figaments of its highest religious leader's own narrow imagination. Said one of the women students in Nafisi's reading club, "Everything is offensive to them. It's either politically or sexually incorrect." Said another student, "There must be some blasted space in life where we can be offensive." Thus, readers can learn from "Lolita" that obsession and rape is not just practiced by pedophiles. Totalitarian and theocratic regimes are masters of it, too.

Nafisi also noted Nabokov's book "Invitation to a Beheading," which is written from "the point of view of the victim, one who ultimately sees the absurd sham of his persecutors and who must retreat into himself in order to survive."

Nafisi wrote, "Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the cruelty to which we were subjected...What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner."