Azar Nafisi

Advantages: brilliant interweaving of literary criticism and women's experiences
Disadvantages: if you don't like lit crit, be warned that it dominates

...graduate, and I have read and studied (or taught) all of the books that Nafisi is writing about. I don't know how easy it would be to follow for someone who hadn't read the books - perhaps one could work through each chapter with the other book to hand, treating it as an English course! Also, there were times when I felt that Nafisi forgot that she was writing for a general audience and launched into a university lecture. This made the book uneven in tone: perhaps her editor should have encouraged her to spend less time lecturing and instead to tell us more about the women of the group (however fictionalised to protect their identities). I would have liked a surer sense of their personalities, instead of the brief portraits, almost cariacatures, that were not enough to carry us over the shifting time scheme. I would suggest that this book... Read review

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Advantages: Fascinating window into another's life; pleasant prose style
Disadvantages: Helps to have read the books; feels like publishers' sociopolitical agenda

...On the same day that I finished Reading Lolita in Tehran, I had noticed a small leaflet pasted to the clear plastic of the bus-stop outside my home, a short walk from London's Central Mosque. It called for Muslims to join a protest outside 10 Downing Street against the West's gross misrepresentation of Islam in the media, in the attack on the faith that has stemmed from the hysterical reaction to the actions of extremists. And it's undeniable that now must be a hard time to be a Muslim in a Western country. Knowing this, I had to wonder about a book that has spent a remarkable length of time in the New York Times' bestsellers list, which has at its core a scathing critique of the Islamic regime in Iran by one who lived through its worst excesses. The book, Nafisi's memoirs of life in Tehran when the revolution came, of being forced... Read review

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Advantages: Books....and people
Disadvantages: That it should have needed to be written

...Born and brought up in Persia (as it then was) Azar Nafisi, lived, studied and worked in Europe and America for seventeen years. In 1979 she returned to the now Islamic Republic of Iran - to the first of the shocks, which hit immediately upon arrival at Tehran airport: “no one so much as smiles. The walls of the airport have dissolved into an alien spectacle, with giant posters of an ayatollah staring down reproachfully. Their mood is echoed in the black and bloodred slogans: DEATH TO AMERICA! DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM & ZIONISM!...” Home, it seems, is not home any more. Yet for the next 18 years Azar and her family will try to make it home again, try to live their own lives. For a University Professor specialising in western literature this was not going to be easy ~ given that she was woman, was it even going to be possible... Read review

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