They Read ‘Lolita’ in Tehran?

Azar’s 2003 book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is a memoir of disillusionment powerfully dramatized for the screen by director Eran Riklis.

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Film

Literature professor Azar Nafisi and her husband made the optimistic decision to return to Iran in 1979 after the Shah was overthrown. They had hopes for their homeland’s future, but as shown in the opening scenes of Reading Lolita in Tehran, warning signs flashed upon arrival. The Revolutionary Guard at the airport immigration checkpoint looked at her lipstick and English-language novels with undisguised disdain. He waved the couple through with a hard stare. It would not be Azar’s last encounter with Iran’s new rulers, nor the worst.

Azar’s 2003 book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is a memoir of disillusionment powerfully dramatized for the screen by Israeli director Eran Riklis. Like the book, the film is divided in four chapters, each concerned with a novel she taught while in Iran: The Great Gatsby (1980), Lolita (1995), Daisy Miller (1988) and Pride & Prejudice (1996).

When she took up her appointment at Tehran University, most of the women were still bareheaded. However, portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini were everywhere and the fog of thought control was thickening. One of her friendlier male students, Bahri, a Khomeini follower, handed her a list of “morally appropriate writings” to teach instead of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella. Others were more hostile, condemning The Great Gatsby for promoting adultery. Next step, militiamen leap from pickup trucks outside campus and beat student protestors with clubs. By 1980 the Iranian Revolution had a one-track mind and deviant thoughts were crushed. We see Azar in the mirror, uncomfortably trying on a hajib after they became mandatory. Golshifteh Farahani’s performance as Azar is superb, her face registering sadness, pain and joy as well as composure.

Life’s Not Simple

After her first failed stint at Tehran University, she returned eight years later, ostensibly to teach English. She may have been unwise to pick Henry James’ Daisy Miller as the text, not only for the density of the prose but its championing of a “modern woman.” The course did not go well, disrupted in part by Iran’s defensive war against Saddam Hussein (then something of a U.S. proxy) with its nightly peel of air raid sirens and an unhealthy cult of martyrdom among the regime’s fervid supporters. Bahri returned to visit after serving at the front, missing an arm. He still disagreed with Azar about literature and life, yet conceded, “It isn’t simple, is it?” He may have been a follower, but he wasn’t blind.

How Azar managed to elude arrest is never addressed. Perhaps her husband’s profession as a much-needed civil engineer granted her one blind eye from the authorities. In a courageous move, she decided to gather some of her female students in her flat for a covert book club. Some of them had been arrested and sent to the infamous Evian Prison. Their horrific memories are glimpsed in flashbacks, contrasting with Azar’s own flashbacks of happier times under the brutal yet relatively permissive Shah. Some of Azar’s students were slapped around by chauvinistic husbands for attending her stealth literary salon. Others were indulged by their families. Together they form a spectrum of human experience in hardship.

And what about Lolita? One of Azar’s pupils condemns the novel for extolling a male pedophile, a charge still levelled by American moralizers. It is a disturbing book, which Azar describes this way: What the narrator, Humbert Humbert, possessed was not the real teenage girl he pursued but only the Lolita he imagined, a lustful fantasy. The author, novelist Vladimir Nabokov, was not on Humbert’s side. Perhaps totalitarian dictators are Humbert Humbert writ large, raping their populations and reimagining them according to their own misshapen preconceptions?

Azar considers leaving Iran once again while pondering all the usual reasons to stay on: it’s her home, her husband has a good job, there are children to raise and her mother’s getting older … After all, she consoles herself, it’s not Somalia or Afghanistan. “It could be worse” (she eventually moves to the U.S.).

Reading Lolita in Tehran arrives at an opportune moment, and not only from the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran. Here in America, books are being banned and authors cancelled by militants on the left and right. It’s not Iran, we tell ourselves, yet the attitudes of some culture war partisans manifests in a similar disapproval of nuance, complexity and imagination. As Azar tells her students, “Great books are supposed to make you feel uncomfortable.” Many people would rather be numb.

Through July 30 at the Downer Theater.