Brown Baggers met on July 20 at Central to discuss Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. Published in 2003, this book chronicles the author’s experience as a secular professional woman living in Iran after the Islamic revolution in Tehran in 1979. She became increasingly marginalized at her job as a university professor and as a woman in Iran. When she finally couldn’t teach anymore she began an in-home class for her a group of her female students which inspired the title. Among other titles, this group read and discussed Nabokov’s classic Lolita.

Readers definitely felt the title was strategic. Lolita is a notably risqué book and Iran a notably conservative country. The suggestion of mixing the two may have piqued more interest than, as one reader observed, a title such as Reading The Great Gatsby in Tehran might have.

Readers enjoyed Nafisi’s compassion for her students, designing this one final class for them even while they could no longer work at or attend the university. That she worked to keep in touch with these women over many years and stay up-to-date on their lives proved her dedication, which readers admired.

The women in Nafisi’s group also engaged in small subversive acts to help them deal with the oppressiveness of the regime. This included leaving wisps of hair outside their veils and wearing gloves which hid forbidden nail polish. Readers felt the girls engaged in these small acts of rebellion because they couldn’t engage in larger regime changing measures.

Largely this book discussed how fiction, especially Western fiction, helped these women focus on possibilities outside the limits of their restrictions and hope for more — even if it was an idealized version of the West which they were reading about.

Similar Titles
Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi
Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer
The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloane

More Information
Interview with the author
Video of the author:

List of books referenced in this book
Other titles by Nafisi

Brown Baggers will meet again on Thursday, August 17 at noon to discuss My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.