Volume 51, Number 11 · June 24, 2004
Stalled in Iran
By Christopher de Bellaigue
When she left Iran for the US in 1997, Azar Nafisi found that she was able to write with a freedom that she had not known since she was last in America as a student in the 1970s. Long muffled by Iranian censorship, she took advantage of her liberty to write a damaging and eloquent account of the Islamic Republic. Damaging, but indirect, for Reading Lolita in Tehran[1] is about reading well-known works of English and American literature in a totalitarian environment—about entering a fictional world whose morally ambiguous characters resist the leveling effects of ideology. In revolutionary Tehran, Nafisi writes, reading Invitation to a Beheading, Pride and Prejudice, and, of course, Lolita offered 'a critical way of appraising and grasping the world.' In a political system that aims ruthlessly to homogenize, to impose a code of behavior and thought, fiction can be a weapon of resistance.
Feature, 4324 words
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