This is the July book for our book club discussion, and it went down well with our group of feminists. Reading Lolita in Tehran is ostensibly a book about a book club, women meeting in Tehran to discuss Western literature. However, the group is not a book club in the usual sense, but a group of selected students of University lecturer Nafisi, and the discussions take place under her guidance. Her notes and recollections of these discussions make up roughly half of the book, but the other half contains Nafisi's (and her students) experiences of the Iranian revolution.
Not knowing a great deal about Iranian history, I found that Reading Lolita sometimes jumped time too abruptly for me, and I would be momentarily lost, trying to figure out what was happening now. On a second reading, however, the narrative flowed much more smoothly - incredibly dense and layered, it's certainly a book that benefits from a second reading.
Nafisi spends a lot of time trying to make sense of her restricted life in Tehran using fictional stories. What I like most in Reading Lolita, I think, is the discussions on the books. The only books I'd read that were discussed were The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice (although my idea of Pride and Prejudice is very influenced by the BBC drama, which I saw before reading the book), but I enjoyed just as much reading about characters that I've never come across before. Reading Lolita made me want to read Henry James and Nabokov.
In fact, I think that I felt closer to the books in this story than the women. The characters of the women were revealed, in a way, by how they reacted to the books, and in the end, I felt like I'd learned more about the books. I love stories with so much to them that they reveal more every time you read them, and I'm looking forward to reading Reading Lolita again in a few months. In the meantime, I should probably attempt to plunge into Henry James.
Not knowing a great deal about Iranian history, I found that Reading Lolita sometimes jumped time too abruptly for me, and I would be momentarily lost, trying to figure out what was happening now. On a second reading, however, the narrative flowed much more smoothly - incredibly dense and layered, it's certainly a book that benefits from a second reading.
Nafisi spends a lot of time trying to make sense of her restricted life in Tehran using fictional stories. What I like most in Reading Lolita, I think, is the discussions on the books. The only books I'd read that were discussed were The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice (although my idea of Pride and Prejudice is very influenced by the BBC drama, which I saw before reading the book), but I enjoyed just as much reading about characters that I've never come across before. Reading Lolita made me want to read Henry James and Nabokov.
In fact, I think that I felt closer to the books in this story than the women. The characters of the women were revealed, in a way, by how they reacted to the books, and in the end, I felt like I'd learned more about the books. I love stories with so much to them that they reveal more every time you read them, and I'm looking forward to reading Reading Lolita again in a few months. In the meantime, I should probably attempt to plunge into Henry James.
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