Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2003

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Key Figures

Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi was born in Tehran, the capital of Iran, in 1948. She describes her family as an old and distinguished one: “[A]s far back as eight hundred years ago […] the Nafisis were known for their contributions to literature and science” (84). Both her mother and father were educated and politically active individuals under the reign of the Shah, with her father serving as mayor of Tehran and her mother acting as a member of the National Consultative Assembly in the 1960s.

Nafisi depicts her upbringing as both cultured and highly privileged. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, she recalls her father reading classic Iranian poetry to her at bedtime, thereby providing an early introduction to literary culture. She spent her childhood being educated abroad in private boarding schools in England and Switzerland. She studied in the United States as a university student, eventually returning to Iran as a professor of English literature.

Nafisi’s experiences teaching at both the University of Tehran and the University of Allameh Tabatabei throughout the 1980s and ’90s are key in Reading Lolita in Tehran. She describes how she tried (and failed) to resist the imposition of the head scarf upon female teachers and students, and the atmosphere in Iranian academia as becoming gradually more restrictive under the Islamic regime. After emigrating permanently to the United States in 1997 with her husband and children, Nafisi returned to university teaching, holding posts at institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown and publishing academic articles in both English and Persian. She has received several honorary doctorates from various American universities and became an American citizen in 2008.

Nafisi published Reading Lolita in Tehran in 2003. It became a bestseller and was translated into dozens of languages. She has since published several other books, including her second memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About (2008), and works of literary criticism such as The Republic of Imagination (2014) and Read Dangerously (2022).

The Magician

The man Nafisi calls her “magician” plays an important role in Reading Lolita in Tehran, yet he remains a somewhat elusive figure. Nafisi never even calls him by his given or assumed name, instead referring to him only as the “magician” or, occasionally, as “Mr. R.” Nassrin describes him as “a gifted writer and critic whose two great loves had been fiction and film” while living under the Shah (33). However, after the Iranian Revolution, the magician chooses to withdraw from the wider world, rejecting the new Islamic regime as oppressive and illegitimate. He spends most of his time in his apartment or in local cafes, meeting with an exclusive group of “carefully selected visitors” who belong to the Iranian cultural elite, including “filmmakers, scriptwriters, painters, writers,” amongst others (34).

The magician functions as both a friend and mentor to Nafisi. She depicts him as a compassionate individual who is a gracious host and willing confidant to those who need comforting: “[H]e spent sleepless nights listening to and absorbing others’ troubles and woes” (317). She confides in him about her secret book club and even shares stories and impressions of her students. Most importantly of all, she depicts him as a key influence in her choice to ultimately emigrate from Iran— “his advice was that I should leave: leave and write my own story and teach my own class” (317). The memoir concludes with Nafisi making one last visit to her magician, knowing that, once she leaves, they will have no further contact, as the magician believes it is important not to remain in touch with those who leave Iran.

The figure of the magician is important not just on a personal level for Nafisi, but on a metaphorical level. The magician represents all of the Iranian intellectuals and artists who have been silenced by the regime, whether directly or indirectly. By not revealing his identity, the magician’s archetypal nature becomes even more pronounced. The magician is both deeply compassionate and principled, yet also, to an extent, quite powerless: He is unable to create freely as he wishes, and often warns Nafisi not to take him as a model worth emulating. The magician is therefore a humane but also tragic figure—an example of all who suffer from the ideological and cultural repression under the Islamic regime.

Nassrin

Nassrin is one of the younger members of Nafisi’s secret book club. Like the magician, Nafisi depicts her as a somewhat elusive figure. She calls her “the Cheshire cat, appearing and disappearing at unexpected turns” (5). She declares her impossible to describe: “One can only say that Nassrin was Nassrin” (5).

Nafisi meets Nassrin when Nassrin is a younger teenager tagging along with Mahshid to listen to Nafisi’s literature lectures, as a guest and not a registered student. While Nafisi is welcoming and encouraging to Nassrin, even asking her to write a paper on The Great Gatsby in return for permission to attend the lectures, Nassrin remains shy and withdrawn. Disaster befalls Nassrin shortly afterward, when she ends up “arrested while distributing leaflets in the streets” and imprisoned by the Islamic regime (191). She is originally sentenced to 10 years, but her sentence is eventually shortened to three thanks to the good standing of her devoutly religious father with the regime. Even after her release, Nassrin remains on probation and finds it difficult to move forward in her professional and personal lives.

Nassrin occasionally speaks of her traumatic experiences, both as a child and as a prisoner. She admits to Nafisi that she was sexually abused by her uncle as a young child, even though her uncle had professed to being a pious man. She recalls how, while in prison, the regime “executed so many of [her] friends” (191), which further traumatizes her. She attempts to have a relationship with a young scholar named Ramin, but rejects him when she feels that he has regressive and contradictory views about women and female sexuality.

By the memoir’s end, Nassrin decides she can no longer endure life in Iran: She escapes abroad to join her sister in England, after which point Nafisi loses all contact with her. Nassrin embodies the experiences undergone by many young women in Iran, who endure both political repression and personal disillusionment, including crises of the self. Through her, Nafasi explores The Problems of Identity and Home. She depicts Nassrin’s escape at the end of the memoir as bittersweet: It is both an attempt to take back agency and emblematic of the sufferings of all those who can’t truly be themselves under the Islamic regime.

Ayatollah Khomeini

While Nafisi never has any direct or personal dealings with Ayatollah Khomeini, he looms large as a forbidding, shadowy presence. In the memoir, Ayatollah Khomeini appears as both the driving force behind the Islamic regime and a symbol of more general totalitarian power.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s long life spanned almost the entirety of the 20th century. He was born in 1900 and given a thorough religious education from a young age. As a young, man he continued his religious studies in Islamic seminaries while maintaining interests in philosophy and poetry, in particular Persian poetry. After a lifetime devoted to religious study and teaching, Ayatollah Khomeini became a political figurehead in his 60s, leading a fundamentalist Islamic movement in opposition to the secular rule of the Shah. In 1979, the Shah’s reign was definitively ended, with Ayatollah Khomeini becoming the Supreme Leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. His rule was characterized by strict laws instituted in accordance with his fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. He maintained power until his death in June 1989.

Nafisi describes Khomeini as a “stern Ayatollah, a self-proclaimed philosopher-king” who tries to exercise total control over the Iranian population in the name of recapturing a purer Islamic past: “[H]e […] wanted to re-create us in the image of that illusory past” (28). Nafisi argues that he is a “conscious mythmaker” who “turned himself into a myth” (246). While Nafisi valorizes writers who create works of imagination and ideas in the fictional realm, she depicts Khomeini’s desire to turn his dreams into a reality as ultimately causing harm to Iran: “[H]e had tried to fashion reality out of his dream, and in the end […] he had managed to destroy both reality and his dream” (246).

For Nafisi, Ayatollah Khomeini represents the dangers of totalitarian power—he is a dangerous dreamer who tries to refashion others according to his own ideology, oppressing and destroying Iranians in his desire to reconstruct reality.