Reading "Lolita" In Tehran

Found this in one of my neighborhood lending libraries, and am glad I did! I will say that it was profoundly uncomfortable, probably in a useful way, to read Nafisi's account of how living through the Islamic Revolution had both terrifying and mundane moments. Eighteen years after Nafisi wrote this and on another continent, American democracy is shuddering along the fault lines of our original sin of racism coupled with unbridled individualism, and it is both terrifying to feel those jolts and also terrifying how the mundane stuff of life carries on. Anyway, given that Nafisi is a professor, it was interesting to me that I enjoyed this memoir much more when she wrote as a memoirist concentrating on her own personal response to the events unfolding around her. The parts she devoted to imparting lessons from the literature she taught often feel clunkily didactic for my current mood (I appreciated the parts about Pride & Prejudice best, having just watched the most recent version before it left Netflix; this is a controversial opinion, but I prefer Matthew Macfayden to Colin Firth as Darcy!). Overall, however, she wrote a remarkable memoir about a remarkable era, and I am glad to have read it.