Books

I'm nearly finished with Reading Lolita in Tehran and it's been a slow, infuriating read, I have to say. It's a rather pedantic, plodding memoir (I'd rather call it a 'lecture') juxtoposing Iranian society from the Revolution through the Iraq-Iran War to the time the author finally leaves the country. Interwoven throughout are long expositions about novels including "Lolita" and "Pride and Prejudice" and of course, the trial of "The Great Gatsby". All of this would be interesting if the book didn't rely so much on the fact the reader must have read all the novels referenced. Without that frame of reference, it really felt like I'd come to English class without reading the homework assignment.

I wanted to know more about the women in the memoir and how they felt about the changes and how they were coping. That was the infuriating part. The author could touch on emotions, could often delicately elicit a certain feeling, and then she would drop it like a hot potato without exploring it. For instance, she talks about not wanting to wear the veil, which is fine, but tell us why. There are so many instances like this whether the author will make an emotional statement but never takes it all the way through to its final conclusion. The isolationism in which she couches her opinions and feelings makes it hard to really get into the book and absorb what points the author is trying to make.

Because of the 'lecture' format of the novel and the way it jumps from situation to situation, it's really hard to get a sense of anyone except for the narrator. The women in her class are simply women who have endured, but you never get a sense of who they are, what they want, and what moves them or what they need. Every now and then, there's a tragic episode that happens to one of these women, and the emotion is definitely felt, but is immediately forgotten in the next chapter because there doesn't really seem to be a desire on the author's part to somehow pull these women together and present a coherent picture of what is happening to them. Instead, to make her point, Nafisi will go on about a novel, usually Nabokov, who makes entirely too many appearances, comparing it to the current situation. That works if the reader has actually read the novels in question. In my case, I'd only read one -- Pride & Prejudice -- and because the women in the book club were simply footnotes, I'd lost all ability to distinguish one from the other by the end of the 300 some odd pages.

The book is well-written, though the paragraph formats are funky and quotations are optional and seemingly used at whim; it's very strange and can be hard to follow every now and then, not to mention highly annoying. Plus there are weird shifts of time, tense, location, and heck, people who were in one paragraph have phased themselves out of the next. Getting through this book is not necessarily so much hard as it's an act of brute force.

There are some great insights in the book (I did find the author's take on the format of "Pride and Prejudice" interesting) but you never quite feel anything about anything that actually happens in it because it's written about in such a measured, professorial tone. For me, that was most disappointing thing. In a time like this, I really wanted to understand more, and instead, I came away feeling like I'd just been in a semester-long English class than just happened to be taught in Tehran.