Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Content Warning: This section depicts abuse of women.



Reading Lolita in Tehran opens with Azar Nafisi, a professor of English literature, introducing the secret book club she founded in Tehran in 1995 with a handful of female former students from her university teaching days. The girls come from different backgrounds and ideological persuasions, yet Nafisi brings them together for two years to read and discuss works of literature, with a special focus on English literature.

Nafisi compares two photographs that were taken in 1997 of her standing with her book club participants, just before she immigrated to the United States. In the first photo, the women are all wearing “black robes and head scarves” in accordance with the Islamic regime’s edicts (4). In the second photo, they have removed their robes and reveal their own individual style in clothing and hairstyles.

Nafisi says that the purpose of her memoir is “to celebrate our reading of Nabokov in Tehran, against all odds” (6). She describes their weekly morning meetings in her home, providing some insights into the personalities and individual circumstances of her book club participants, whom she often refers to as her “girls.”

Nafisi alternates between discussing the camaraderie and freedom of her secret book club with the repressive atmosphere in Iran under the post-revolutionary Islamic regime. She describes the heavy restrictions placed upon women, including the female teachers and students of her university teaching days: the daily inspections of clothing before being allowed to enter campus, and the forbidding of running upstairs, wearing make-up, or even laughing aloud. Nafisi details the regime’s attempts to suppress all traces of individuality in the name of their ideological ideal: “[M]y girls had both a real history and a fabricated one. Although they came from very different backgrounds, the regime […] tried to make their personal identities and histories irrelevant” (27-28).

The secret book club is born out of a desire to maintain something of individuality and intellectual freedom. Nafisi writes—“like Lolita, we tried to escape and create our own little pockets of freedom” (25). Nafisi contrasts how she and her girls approach literature and how the Islamic regime views it: Literature is a source of freedom, humanity, and open-ended exploration of ideas and experiences for Nafisi and her girls; for the regime, literature is only worthwhile if it conforms to, and promotes, its own fundamentalist ideology. Nafisi discusses at length how Nabokov’s novel Lolita reflects the abuses of power and what it is like to live under a totalitarian regime.

Nafisi also recalls the conversation when she first persuaded Yassi, one of her girls, to join her secret book club. She speaks to Yassi about a mysterious figure called “the magician,” who she tells Yassi is a character in a Nabokov story, but later reveals to the reader is a real person in Tehran. Nafisi describes the magician as “a gifted writer and critic” who has withdrawn entirely from public and professional life since the installation of the Islamic regime (33). Living in a small apartment, he keeps contact with “carefully selected visitors” from Iran’s cultural scene (34). Nafisi credits the magician as being “as dangerous to the state as an armed rebel” due to his principled non-compliance with the regime (34).

Nafisi recalls some of the debates that erupt in her secret book club, especially concerning moral issues like adultery. She also describes an unusual morning when her house is invaded by officers from the Revolutionary Committee, who engage in a shoot-out with a man they are trying to arrest on her neighbors’ property. Nafisi and her family are nervous the entire time, not just because of the shooting but because they, “like all normal Iranian citizens, were guilty and had something to hide […],” their “satellite dish” (64).

Nafisi ends Part 1 with an account of how one of her girls, Sanaz, gets arrested by the Revolutionary Guards while having a weekend with friends by the Caspian Sea because the “morality squads” object to the social mixing of young men and women (72). Sanaz is given “twenty-five lashes” as punishment (73). Nafisi compares her experiences as a young woman in pre-revolutionary Iran to the experiences of her girls, writing that while she and her contemporaries “had a past to compare with the present” and know what freedom is like, her girls have never known what it is to be free: “This generation had no past” (76).