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Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi, Vintage - $14

A novel, unlike a painting, paints itself before your eyes and mind. The writer sketches in characters and plot elements, holding back traits and events to conjure swirls of hope, conjecture suspense - then revealing in hopefully dramatic fashion the styling, and nature of the personalities in an unfolding , the denouement of the work. So whose to say the same can't and isn't done for non-fiction. Certainly Margret McMillan's Paris 1919 sketches out in bold and early strokes Woodrow Wilson , Lloyd George, Clemenceau and some of the other key players in the fateful negotiations in Paris over the Peace that was to conclude the War to Ends All Wars. So why not a fiction-enhanced memoirs (whose to tell otherwise) as story within a story.

Now I am a weaver, I like to see the threads slowly but surely built up as I discover the fabric of motivations that impels and drives each character on the stage - and how nuances and changes of tone and interactive motive pulls players into and out of conflict, digression, indecision or maybe sheer ennui. But right away Afar Nafisi describes Mitra "who was perhaps the calmest among us. Like the pastel colors of her painting, she seemed to recede and fade into a paler register. Her beauty was saved from predictability by two dimples which she could and did use to manipulate many an unsuspecting victim into bending to her will." And in like fashion we have a brief but bold character sketches of Manna, Mashid, Yassi, Azin, Mitra, Sanaz, Nassrin - 7 Iranian women students who "for nearly two years, almost every Thursday morning, rain or shine, they came to my house, and almost every time , I could not get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and drab robes and burst into color. When my students came into that room, they took off more than their scarves and robes. Gradually each one gained an outline and shape, becoming her own inimitable self. ... The theme of the class was the relation between fiction and reality. We read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our own lady of fiction, Scheherazade from a A Thousand and One Nights along with Western classics - Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Daisy Miller, The Dean's December, and yes, Lolita." In sum plot and characters are well delineated within 3 pages in. So readers won't have to piece together a careful model of people, place and events in these memoirs ... or will they ?

So Lolita in Tehran is a memoir of students and teacher partaking of the forbidden fruit - reading, discussing Western novels in the Tehran of the late 1990's - a society that has gone Islamic fundamentalist 20 years and counting. It is a story of the consequences of that. It is in a city that wavers and sloshes between fundamentalism and pragmatism about dealing with things Western ... and the political tides have yet to catch a consistent beat or synchrony.

This is what reading Lolita and then Gatsby and then Henry James followed by Jane Austen allows Azar to uncover - the nature of being in this world of Islamic fundamentalism versus Western humanistic hegemony. The books are a means to an end - revealing the similarities and the gaps in culture between the fictional worlds of Western novels and the almost surreal "realities" of live in Iran under Islam.

For example, reading Nabokov's Lolita really deals with a whole gamut of political and social issues but on a very personal basis. And the robust frankness of the students and their ensuing discussions is at time disarming, almost incredulous. And then little quirks of character appear to turn it true. But I have seen it in the writing - the need to protect the innocence and identity of her girls has made Azar's memoirs nigh closer to transfictional - at the borderline between reality and creation, that is often the path and place of great writing. This is versimilitude masquerading as fact, fact in the guise of fiction - its all to be found for the Reading of Lolita in Tehran.

(c)JBSurveyer 2005