2009 Dewey Decimal Project: 820.9 NAFISI

[rsadelle]

1

It is a Tuesday in February. This is the start of my second year of helping my mother clean out and organize her house. In practice, this means that I go over to her house every second or third Tuesday and stand or sit with her and ask the occasional question while she does most of the work and all of the hard work - the decision making.

Her books are an ongoing project. She won't or can't get rid of very many of them. On this Tuesday, she's sorting and rearranging the stacks of unread books that create uneven towers in the corner of her living room. At the bottom of one stack is the copy of Zadie Smith's White Teeth she had me pick up for her on a trip to Barnes & Noble when I still lived with my parents. I haven't lived there for five and a half years.

Halfway through sorting, as she flips a book open to a random page to see what it is and if she wants to keep it, she rejects it based on the size of the print. She looks at the stack of books she's already rearranged, sighs, I should really check all of them for print size. She doesn't.

Somewhere in the stack is Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. I want to read that, I say. She hands it to me. You have to give it back. I'd been hoping I could read it, pass it on, make it one more book out of the stack.

2

In February, I read a book that I had hoped would be more about elephants when it turned out to be more about people. I had hoped Reading Lolita In Tehran would be more about people, especially once I got into the first section, but it's more about literature, and more about the crushing sense of life in a totalitarian regime, and life in a totalitarian regime at war.

3

Early in the book, on page 50, Nafisi recounts one of her students' thoughts: "It's strange, but some critics seem to treat the text the same way Humbert treats Lolita: they only see themselves and what they want to see." When I read it, it seemed like Nafisi wanted it to be a startling revelation. Perhaps, if there were more set up for this to be surprising to her girls. To me, though, it's obvious. It's Anais Nin's "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

4

I was startled by how strong a reaction I had to Lolita without ever having read it. My instinctive response was revulsion at what Humbert does to an innocent girl, to such a point that I had a hard time reading Nafisi's plot summary of the book.

5

This book belongs as the centerpiece of a class on Western literature and Iranian history. It's divided into four sections: "Lolita," "Gatsby," "James," and "Austen." Austen is the only one I've read. My knowledge of Iranian history is superficial at best. I wonder how the book would be different if I'd read the things she references, or knew the historical facts behind her emotional memories of the Revolution and the bombings of Tehran.

6

The back of the book led me to believe the book would be about Nafisi's experiences with the private literature class she convened in her living room. The first and fourth sections of the book are about that, but the second and third are not.

7

The first section of the book - "Lolita" - reminded me of the feeling I always have about Resonant's "Transfigurations": I always expect tragedy. "Transfigurations" is not without its deaths, but it ultimately ends happily. In the Epilogue, Nafisi tells us of her students now. They are all still alive. Several of them have left Iran. Those who haven't continue to read literature.

8

I'm always struck by startling statements uncommented on. In this:

I joined the Iranian student movement reluctantly. My father's imprisonment and my family's vague nationalist sympathies had sensitized me towards politics, but I was more of a rebel than a political activist - though in those days there was not much difference between them. One attraction was the fact that the men in the movement didn't try to assault or seduce me. Instead, they held study groups in which we read and discussed Engels's Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Which reminded me of this, from brown_betty's "The Underwire Job":

It came out sharper than he meant it, but she didn't look insulted, only puzzled. "Feelings are hard," she said finally. "But he's a good kisser. And he stopped when we had to stop."

There was something really dark and nasty behind that sentence, and Eliot did not want to go anywhere near it, other than taking a mental note to hurt some son of a bitch if it turned out that was required.

9

I'm hungry, but it's time to do yoga. It's time to do yoga, but I'm so close to the end of the book. I'll finish the book, I tell myself, and then do yoga.

I get to the end of the Epilogue and cry. I put the book down in my lap, take off my glasses, wipe my eyes with the palms of my hands. Why am I crying? I ask myself. The people we've come to know live. They keep reading.

I dry my eyes, put my glasses back on. It's time to do yoga.

But I know how to structure my entry about this book. I sit down and write half of this. I stop and do my yoga. Is my heart more open? Is my mind clearer?

10

"He continues almost breathlessly, with a sort of venom that is uncalled-for in relation to a work of fiction."

I was bothered by this. If she wants her students to be passionate about literature, to love it, to see in it a different world, can't venom be a part of that?

11

Every time I came to a section 11, I thought, "But surely I'm farther along than part 2." The typeface, Bembo, according to the note in the back of the book, makes 11 look like the Roman numeral II.

12

The last section of the book is "Austen," which is the only one where I'd actually read any of the referenced literature.

I have to confess that I don't understand the love of Mr. Darcy. Even Nafisi's students love him. Am I missing the appeal because I'm not straight or because he's more appealing in the book, which I only read once, twelve years ago?

I keep thinking of the cynical note, possibly from dialogue in Miss Austen Regrets, that Elizabeth only realizes she loves Darcy when she sees how large his house is.

13

Perhaps I shouldn't have taken a break. I've lost the sense of what else I meant to write about.

14

Nafisi has an interesting literary premise: "This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy."

My instinctive skeptic wants to question it. I'll have to pay attention and see if I find that true in the things I read.

15

I thought about writing this entry as I read. I've read that if you're thinking about what you're going to say in response, you're not really listening. Was I not really listening by thinking about how I was going to talk about it? Or does the fact that the book is, at least in part, about talking about literature, mean that I was engaging with it the way I was meant to?