Azar Nafisi was a cultured and respected university lecturer when the Iranian revolution began. Watching her life and that of her friends become ever Azar Nafisi was a cultured and respected university lecturer when the Iranian revolution began. Watching her life and that of her friends become ever more irrelevant and marginalised under Ayatollah Kohmeni's rule, Nafisi's response was to swallow-dive into the great literature she has clearly loved all of her life, taking seven of her best students with her via private classes at her home. This is the story of those classes.
The book is far from perfect - like others I found her tone quite self-satisfied in places, and the time jums could be disorienting. I too was vaguely annoyed to be fed spoilers for Daisy Miller and The Great Gatsby, but am overlooking that because I was enthralled by what she had to say about Nabokov, and Lolita (one of my all-time favourite books) in particular.
The background of the revolution and the war with Iraq pervades the narrative, but does not overpower it. As the book progresses the hundred mundane petty cruelties of the state build, and when a moment of true horror comes it is invariably dropped in almost casually, which of course only underscores the barbarity that is so rife just below the surface of their lives.
In places Nafisi's evocative language lends an almost dreamlike quality to much of the story, and if her prose sometimes feels overwrought it is nonetheless appropriate for a memoir concerned with transcendent and transformative nature of fiction. It's literary criticism may not be of the standard or depth that some reviewers seem to have been expecting, but as she was writing a memoir and not a dissertation I think she strikes a good balance. In short - a real booklover's book, and one that will make you hungry to read and re-read the classics she found salvation in....more
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