It has been a while since I read this but I felt obligated to rate it.

I read this book to assist me to better understand womens views on Iran. This book assisted me in so many ways. it was a true treasure to find. I recommends this book to anybody who is vaguely interested in other walks of like outside of their own.

"Reading Lolita in Tehran" (RLT) is a Persian variation on "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Both are about surviving cruel, arbitrary tyrants.

There was a brilliant essay on RLT in the July 19, 2004 "Washington Post" entitled "Sorry, Wrong Chador." At the time, Nafisi's book had not even been translated into Persian, but Iranians still had opinions about it:

"The problem, several Iranians said in interviews, is that Nafisi left Tehran seven years ago. Her highly personal account of 18 years living under the mullahs is as absorbing a history as might be found of this place in that time. But it ends precisely at what most people here call the dawn of a new era in Iran, the 1997 landslide election of Mohammad Khatami as president."

Some may believe it dated, but "Reading Lolita in Tehran," just like Solzhenitsyn's classic, is actually timeless. Nafisi's mullahs may be history, just as Stalin's labor camps are now history, but somewhere in the world people are still unjustly imprisoned. Somewhere in the world women are still treated as non-citizens.

Iran itself is not yet a paradise for women. The Iranian Nobel peace prize winner, Shirin Ebadi has recently received death threats for her 'un-Islamic' behavior--she is the cofounder of the Tehran-based Center of Human Rights Defenders, which was banned by the Interior Ministry. Iranian women are still fighting for free access to public places such as universities and coffee shops. The police periodically campaign against 'un-Islamic' dress.

As far as I know, it is still legal to marry a nine-year-old girl in Iran, a practice Nafisi fiercely condemns--and this brings us back to "Lolita" and why Nabokov's book was so popular with Nafisi's students.

My own impression of "Lolita" was 'silly nymphet with heart-shaped sunglasses seduces helpless adult male'. Yukk! I had never actually read it or seen the movie.

Nafisi points out that my synopsis was completely wrong. It should have read, 'powerful adult male kills young girl's mother and takes complete control of his stepdaughter, even to the point of renaming her (Lolita's real name was 'Dolores'.) He forces her to conform to his most intimate fantasies, and if he is in some way disappointed, he blames and punishes her.

Humbert Humbert reminds Nafisi's students of various males who had abused them, including the mullahs who were then in power. One student was sent to prison because a male caught a glimpse of her neck and found it highly erotic. There are some very sad stories in this book about the abuse of women and the stunting of human relationships, all in the name of religion and power.

But RLT also pays tribute to the vitality and teaching power of Western and Persian literature. I had never realized how gloriously subversive Jane Austin's novels were until I read Nafasi. Tyrants should never rest easy on their thrones if their subjects can read Austen, Nabokov, Henry James, or even Mark Twain. This book really opened my eyes as to why fiction should be read. It can be even more dangerous than books about making bombs.