Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi is an Iranian woman and a professor of English Literature. Reading Lolita in Tehran is her memoir of the time after the Islamic Revolution when she and a small group of her female students continued to study the books they loved in a kind of secret book club she hosted in her home.

As such, it is appropriately more a story of these women than these books, but my favorite part was the way she framed the events of their lives, and the revolution and society going on around them, through the famous characters in the novels they were reading.

Through this technique, it is easy to see Humbert Humbert in Lolita as a representative of the repressed Islamist yearning for his own freedom, and it is easy to see Daisy Miller in that Henry James classic as the embodiment of the woman they all wished to be.

But who is the “great” Jay Gatsby? And who is Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice? With them, I was unable to make any significant connections. 

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.