Feeling the Freedom

a book review of Reading Lolita in Tehran
The #1 New York Times Bestsellers
A memoir in a book by Azar Nafisi
347 + ix (pgs), published by Random House USA

-For Ayox, in the loneliness island of Bacan North Maluku, enjoy reading life sentences-


“The genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restriction” (Nafisi on Reading Lolita in Tehran)


I was accompanying my friend looking for English books in one foreign bookstore in Yogya, when I saw “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. I read the comments on the back page; it was very attractive, successfully persuaded me not to leave the bookstore without having it.

Imported books are much more expensive here, even though Yogya has many English readers as a tourism place, it does not has any impact of the price of imported book to getting cheaper. But I don’t want to wait until the translated edition published in Indonesia, it may take 2 or 3 years after.

This book is a memoir of a university teacher who teaches literacy, named Azar Nafisi. Teaching in the Islamic Republic was subservient to politics and subject to arbitrary rules. She resigned from the university she used to work, she felt there is no freedom on exploring the subject she teach under the arbitrary and narrow minded of the regime. Then she selected seven female of her students continuing the class at her house, a secret class.

Under the Iran revolutionary regime with very fundamentalist Islamic setting, she teaches western classic literacy. They gathered the freedom of thought trough fictions. It seemed that Nabokov’s novel “Lolita” was inspiring this book. They tried to understand, the reality of life under the regime and the reality on fiction.

Why Lolita? Lolita was not critique of the Islamic Republic. Lolita a novel about a man who in order to possess and captivate a twelve- year old girls, indirectly causes the death of her mother. Lolita went against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives. Nafisi asks to imagine reading Lolita in Tehran, connecting to their reality of life. Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limit that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present there is an affirmation to life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance.

Not only reading and exploring Lolita, in this book you will explore more other classical fictions, you will felt that you are in the class and directly teach by Nafisi. Set up your own background by imagined her mind set. This book also compassion of Nafisi, passed the years under the regime.

Nafisi described be a woman living under the tyrant is like having sex with a man you loathe. It is like if you are forced to having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank, you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend you forget your body, and you hate your body. She created original work on the relationship between life and literature.

I persuade you, to read this book, especially for my female friends, and let us celebrate the liberating power of literature.

Cheers