Quite a day yesterday. I never got dressed! Spent the entire day in my sweats, reading and competing with the cat for nap champ. I didn’t even go outside. Got a lot of reading done but I still may not finish the book in time. I’ll have to push hard tonight as well. The book is Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. It’s a memoir of her experiences as a teacher of English lit in post revolutionary Iran. Much like Primo Levi tells his story using the elements as the fabric in The Periodic Table Nafisi reflects the events of the last 25 years in Iran in the mirror of the literature she loves. This is a story about how dogmatic ideological totalitarianism tries to crush the human spirit and how it never can completely win. And how when ideas (Islamic Fundamentalism in this case) become more important than individuals those ideas can be used to justify the most horrible acts. Novels like Lolita and Daisy Miller are banned because their characters are not “moral” and don’t fit the ideal of the Islamic Republic, even though the stories really are condemnation of the vacant lives of their characters. Nafisi makes the point that a novel is not moral or immoral, but is a window into another world where we must make our own judgements about the lives of the characters. Nafisi gives us a wonderful story of young women (and some men) keeping their intellectual spirits alive in the worst of conditions. She also presents, for me at least, a history of the Islamic Revolution in Iran as well as some great insights to great literature.
And now I must get ready for work.
Peace.