Sunday, May 04, 2003

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=23191

The Word

Books Are Us

An Iranian memoir about reading fiction in a censored society is chilling, says Mini Kapoor

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books By Azar Nafisi Random House Price: $19 In the fall of 1995, eight women congregated in the living room of Azar Nafisi▓s second-floor Tehran apartment ≈ with its mismatched furniture testifying to her peripatetic past, the upper branches of a sprawling tree casting a green curtain on the bustle in the street below but retaining a vistaed view of the Elburz Mountains. For two years they would continue to honour this Thursday morning rendezvous.   As the eight readers progressed from A Thousand and One Nights to Lolita, they found alleys out of their claustrophobia. Nafisi immediately clarifies that their personal narratives bore no resemblance to the novel, it was instead the theme that illuminated their predicament: the confiscation of one individual▓s life by another. In surreal times when men worried about dreaming ⌠illegal dreams■, they found that ⌠in most of Nabokov▓s novels there was always the shadow of another world, one that was only attainable through fiction. It is this world that prevents his heroes and heroines from utter despair, that becomes their refuge in a life that is consistently brutal.■ Their task was akin to many of Nabokov▓s protagonists: to locate ⌠a rent in (their)world leading to another world of tenderness and beauty■. ■.   .

URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=23191  Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay)