Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi (New York : Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003)
Azar Nafisi belives in fiction. A novel, she writes, "is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel." As Nafisi writes about Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jane Austen, and others, she intertwines the fictional lives they create with the very real lives of Iranians, especially the seven women who joined her each Thursday morning, for two years, to discuss literature. Even on Nafisi's darkest days in the Islamic Republic of Iran, readers sense fiction's power to encourage strength, self-respect, and survival. This beautiful, essential, book has much to teach, along with warnings for all of us who value freedom. Enter Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran at your own risk -- her wisdom is seductive and subversive.
Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to 'see' others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennett) as well as the worst of us (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.... -- from Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
Websites
Azar Nafisi's Dialogue Project
http://dialogueproject.sais-jhu.edu
Reading Guide
http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides3/reading_lolita_in_tehran1.asp
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