Reading Lolita in Tehran

Dr. Azar Nafisi, having resigned as a professor of literature at the University of Tehran, gave private classes in her home to a group of seven hand picked female students. Reading Lolita in Tehran is her memoir of this post revolutionary period. They study Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austin. Iran at that time was a very difficult place for women who had been raised in a progressive secular society to exist. The works they read were forbidden by the regime; the books were applied, almost like a poultice, to the wounded areas of the group's psyche. Nafisi provides a portal into the lives of ordinary middle class Iranian women. She is a gifted teacher who relates literary characters to the political and this a very special book group but somehow I found the book intriguing rather than enthralling. I thought that the real life fundamentalists were superficially drawn and that the book was not particularly well-written. It satisfied some curiosity I had about the lives of women in Iran but, to be frank, I was glad to finish it and it won't remain on my bookshelves but will be placed in my literary recycling box.