Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

show spoilers

People edit see section history

• Yassi: one of the women/students, youngest of the group
• Mahshid: one of the women/students
• Nassrin: one of the women/students
• Mitra: one of the women/students
• Sanaz: one of the women/students
• Azin: one of the women/students
• Manna: One of the women/students.
• Mr. Nyazi: one of Nafisi's university students supporting the revolutionary government and the one who plays the role of prosecutor in Gatsby's trial
• Mr. Bahri: one of Nafisi's university students supporting the revolutionary government
• Mrs. Rezvan: a prof in Allameh university who persuades the writer to start teaching again
• Bijan: the writers husband
• Ramin: Nassrin's suitor
• Farideh: the writer's friend
• Negar: the writer's daughter
• Laleh: the writer's friend
• Ayatollah Khomeini: the leader of the Islamic Revolution

Quotes edit see section history

• “Works of imagination that did not carry a political message were deemed dangerous”

• “Each one of my girls had cooked something specialriceand lamb, potato salad, dolmeh, saffron rice and a big round cake. My family joined us, andwe all gathered around the table, joking and laughing. Madame Bovary had done what years ofteaching at the university had not: it created a shared intimacy.During the years they came to my house, they knew my family, my kitchen, my bedroom, theway I dressed and walked and talked at home. I had never set foot in their houses, I never met thetraumatized mother, the delinquent brother, the shy sister. I could never place or locate theirprivate narrative within a context, a locality. Yet I had met all of them in the magical space of myliving room. They came to my house in a disembodied state of suspension, bringing to my livingroom their secrets, their pains and their gifts”

• “Nassrin had been sent to the disciplinary committee to have her eyelashes checked. Her lashes were long, and she was suspected of using mascara. That's nothing, said Manna, next to what happened to my sister's friends at the Amir Kabir Polytechnic University. During lunch three of the girls were in the yard eating apples. They were reprimanded by the guards: they were biting their apples too seductively!”

• “The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.”

• “Lack of empathy was to my mind the cetral sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed.”

• “When I was growing up, in the 1960s, there was little difference between my rights and the rights of women in Western democracies.”

• “Love was forbidden, banished from the public sphere. How could it be experienced if its expression was illegal?”

• “a word, like a lost opportunity, cannot be taken back once it has been uttered.”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

  Highlighted by 152 Kindle customers

• Nabokov—“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”—the

  Highlighted by 123 Kindle customers

• A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

  Highlighted by 99 Kindle customers

• Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

  Highlighted by 87 Kindle customers

• We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

  Highlighted by 86 Kindle customers

• What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner.

  Highlighted by 77 Kindle customers

• Poshlust, Nabokov explains, “is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.”

  Highlighted by 76 Kindle customers

• “Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche had said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

  Highlighted by 74 Kindle customers

• We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.

  Highlighted by 73 Kindle customers

• This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.

  Highlighted by 50 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Tehran
• Iran
• United States
• London
• Iraq
• Europe
• England
• Turkey
• Switzerland
• Canada
• New York

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• The nature of fundamentalist religion and totalitarianism and the link between them and intolerance born of fear and self-doubt: People who embrace fundamental religious doctrines do so in order to not have to make decisions. The fundamentalist leaders tell these people what is right and wrong and there is no moral ambiguity in the instructions. Any dissent is crushed immediately before followers have an opportunity to "think impure thoughts".

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Azar Nafisi (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 820.9

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Add a note to help parents select a book for a child.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Arts & Literature › Authors
• Books › Biographies & Memoirs › Memoirs
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Women's Fiction

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books That Influenced This Book edit see section history

Books Cited by This Book edit see section history