GIVEAWAY and Review - Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

 

This year, I’ve been in pursuit of new horizons, reading wise. I’ve read new genres, challenged myself to broaden my knowledge of authors, and developed and deepened my existing love for fairytales, among other things. My blog has led me to some wonderful people, books and experiences so far, and my two greatest reading experiences of 2011 so far have been, weirdly, about Iran.

The first was Persepolis, which blew me away (read my review if you want to see somebody get very excited about a graphic novel. I’ve since bought and watched the film, and adored that, too), and Reading Lolita in Tehran had a similar vibe. Books are a big feature in Persepolis; they are Marjane Satrapi’s education and escape, as they are here. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir. Written by a literature professor, and book devotee, it is the story of the struggle of women, and of culture – literature in particular – under the Islamic government after the Iranian Revolution. The novel is divided into four parts: Lolita, Gatsby, James, and Austen, and portrays the journey of Azar Nafisi and many of her various students, through works of literature. Nafisi is very clever in the way that she uses the literature to reflect what is happening in Iran, or with the women, her students. Starting with Lolita, she says;

“To reinvent her, Humbert must take Lolita from her own real history, and replace it with his own, turning Lolita into a reincarnation” p36

This reincarnation is a direct reference to the way that women were being ‘reinvented’ under the Islamic Regime – forced to wear the veil, arrested for the tiniest things, abused by men on the slightest provocation. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a novel about fear; and not fear as many of us know it, but real, proper terror that you could be executed for daring to protest. It is also a novel about hope.

For me, it was a feminist novel in the very best sense. Nafisi was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil, and throughout the book, she simultaneously laments the loss of her students’ physical identities, while highlighting the things which make them so individual. With ‘her girls’, she talks about many books, but the ones she highlights in the novel (Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, Pride & Prejudice), have an array of very strong female characters. The classes that Nafisi teaches throughout the novel are all joyously free in comparison to extreme repression going on around them, whether they are the earliest ones, at the University of Tehran, or the far later, secret meetings at her house, where students read from Xeroxed copies of books, because the bookshops had been raided and closed down. In every class, there is a student who feels the Western literature Nafisi is teaching is ‘immoral’ and should be banned, and in every class, Nafisi stands up for her books. There is not only a love of literature, but a total immersion of the self in literature throughout the novel, which amazed me. We all talk about literature and reading as a form of escapism, but for these women it literally was. For them, the books, the classes, the secret meetings, provided them with a way to relate, and a way to remove themselves from the lives the regime forces them to live, and place themselves in a world where they could have the lives that they wanted. Reading Lolita in Tehran was the extreme of the best the experience of reading can provide:

“This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing”   p 111

Nafisi’s attitude towards books reminded me of myself. At one point, she walks past a bookstore and goes in, on a whim that it won’t be there much longer. She gathers up armfuls of books to buy, and there’s a feeling of urgency, like she wants to protect the books – take them home and keep them safe – which is exactly how I feel when I’m out on a book splurge, except that she had a reason to feel that way, and I don’t. For people who really, truly love books though, I think that the idea of them not being around or readily available, let alone being banned, is enough to induce serious panic. Nafisi vocalises the way that I’ve felt about books for a long while. When you read a novel, you bury yourself in it, get passionate about it, and discuss characters as if they were real. You live it along with the characters. Reading allows you to have many lives at the same time, to be many places at once, to literally be wherever, whoever, whatever you want to be.

I wonder if people who write memoirs based around books do so because their lives hinge around what they read. I could probably sum up most of my major life events by what I was reading at the time – my childhood is Enid Blyton, the Chalet School, E. Nesbitt, and my Dad’s made up stories, early adolescence was The Babysitters Club, a lot of Lois Lowry, Paula Danziger, and Judy Blume, later teenage years filled with Douglas Adams, Tolkien, The Catcher in the Rye, I Capture the Castle, and many many readings of Alex Garland’s The Beach. Every desperate situation that I’ve felt I couldn’t get through and turned to an old friend for comfort, comfort has been found in the arms of the series starting with Little Women.  I could go on, and I’m sure many of you could do the same.

For those of us who are readers, what is it that we hope to get from our study of books? Because whatever genre you read, in whatever way you read it, reading is study. Although there may be many people in the world who can read a book and simply enjoy it, without thinking about it much, I know that many of us bloggers out here, to name just one group, will read a book, and think about it, make notes on it, and often get out a pencil and underline things, put rings around them, emphasize in some way the points which stand out to us – the ones that are important, that we want to make sense of, or that are just so on the money that we can’t believe they were written by another person and haven’t come straight out of our own heads.

 “The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes” p94

Reading Lolita in Tehran made me think about many things, and it made me think about things which were uncomfortable for me, and I feel refreshed for it.

****GIVEAWAY****

I loved this book. It was everything that I want a book to be – informative, riveting, about a place I’ve never been to and know nothing about, and packed full of amazingly strong women, and engrossing, immersive books. It made me want to read and think and discuss things. After I’d finished it, I wanted to write and be impassioned and to change the world. As reality will probably prevent me from doing that, I’m spreading the love and hoping someone else will get inspired too!

I don’t do giveaways very often, but I have some serious major love for this book, so if you’d like me to send you a brand new free copy, please leave your email address in a comment below, and either the title of a book that’s inspired you, or a link to something awesome that has! I’ll pick a winner at the end of the week! :-) 

The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide

Synopsis from Goodreads:
The Household Guide to Dying is a moving, witty, and uplifting novel about Delia, who writes an acerbic and wildly popular household advice column. When Delia realizes that she is losing her long battle with cancer, she decides to organize her remaining months - and her husband and children's future lives without her - the same way she has always ordered their household. Unlike the many faithful readers of her advice column - people who are rendered lost and confused when faced with dirty shirt collars - Delia knows just what to do. She will leave a list for her daughter's future wedding; fill the freezer with homemade sausages, stews, and sauces; and even (maddeningly) offer her husband suggestions for a new wife. She'll compile a lifetime's worth of advice for her children, and she'll even write the ultimate "Household Guide to Dying" for her fans. There is one item on her list, however, that proves too much even for "Dear Delia," and it is the single greatest task she had set for herself. Yet just as Delia is coming to terms with this, an unexpected visitor helps her believe in her life's worth in a way that no list ever could.

I first found this book over at Page Turners, while looking for another book for the Australia section of the Global Reading Challenge. After saying over and over again how I need to cut down on the amount of challenges I'm doing, I went and upped my participation level to Medium, meaning I've got tor read 2 books from each continent now, instead of one....Anyway! 

I expected The Household Guide to Dying to be much heavier than it actually was. For a book about death, it is very much, as the subtitle suggests, a story about life. My favourite part of this book, was the references to Mrs Beeton, and keeping hens. This is something that I really want to do. I'm not sure why, but for absolutely years I've been seized with an insane desire to keep hens, and have fresh eggs in the morning. Well, if I'm honest, actually I'd just like to have a farm,but don't think I could bring myself to kill the animals...

Aside from that, I liked the way that the story expanded, to involve not just the present and the future, but also the past. I have to say that while I enjoyed the novel, I did find a bit disjointed and slightly less than coherent. The story of Delia's past never really connected with her present for me. While I understand that when people have a tragedy in their past they will often try to distance themselves from it, it wasn't like she'd cut it out of her life completely, but nor had she managed to reconcile it with her life in the present. Despite constantly talking about the fact that she is dying, it didn't seem to really affect her emotionally until the end. However, I did think that her husband, Archie, was the strongest character from this point of view; throughout the story, he is clearly struggling to come to terms with what is happening, and the book follows his emotional journey much more so than Delia's. There were some moving scenes, but I did feel that the book was ultimately more about other people's experiences and tragedies than Delia's own.

I read this for the Global Reading Challenge, but although I will still count it, it did not have a very strong sense of place for me. It is set in Australia, but really it could be anywhere, as there is not much reference to weather, culture, or place throughout the novel.

Overall, I read the book quickly, and enjoyed it, but it didn't quite manage to live up to my expectations.

Rating: ***

Map of the Invisible World by Tash Aw

Reading this book made me realise just how much 'easy' reading I've been doing lately. Map of the Invisible World is about Indonesia in the '60s, a country I know next to nothing about, so it was very interesting from that point of view, as well as for the actual story. It's a book that requires concentration, and I found it really rewarding to read.

The storyline focuses on Adam, an orphan, who has been adopted by Karl, and Indonesian born Dutch man. At the beginning of the novel, Karl is seized by the polic, and taken away to be 'repatriated'. The basic focus of the novel is on Adam's struggle to find Karl, and the people that he meets while doing this. It is a reflection of the struggles within Indonesia, told with a combination of the naivety of Adam, a teenager who is still very innocent, the experience of the country from the point of view of an American, who has lived there for years, a girl who wants to make a difference, and the anguish of a Sumatran extremist.

According to the blurb, the novel is about the seperation of Adam from his brother, Johan, as a child. In actualilty, Johan only seems to appear in order to lend more depth and understanding to Adam's story. His struggle to come to terms with his past and identity, mirror the struggles within the country, to assert itself, and for me, this made the novel very beautiful and poignant to read.

Map of the Invisible World was both beautifully written, intensely engaging, and hugely informative. It reminded me that my cognitive faculties are alive and well, and for this I'm very grateful!

Rating: ****

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis amazed me. For starters, it is the first graphic novel I have ever read which is not from the fantasy genre. I found the use of the cartoons a hugely effective way of portraying the storyline, and was also stunned by how unexpectedly funny it was, given the subject matter. It actually made me laugh out loud.

The book is basically Satrapi's autobiography, and tells her story from childhood, beginning in 1980, during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, all the way through to 1994, when she left Iran to study in Paris. The fact that it is graphic helps to slightly distance the reader from the horrors contained within the story. As a child, Marjane learns about the imprisonment of her grandfather, experiences the imprisonment and execution of her uncle, and has to contend with the Guardians of the Revolution, while out buying Kim Wilde tapes off the Black Market.

The second part of the novel deals with her period of living in Vienna, where her parents sent her to continue her education, aged 14. From the horror and repression of Iran during a war, Satrapi emerges to a society which shuns her as a foreigner: when she fights back against her headmistress telling her that Iranians have no education, she is expelled, and eventually spirals from drugs, a boyfriend who spends all of her money, and who mother hates her for being different, into homelessness,a nd finally back to her family in Iran.

Persepolis is surprisingly humorous and hugely perceptive. It depicts many of the way in which the so called 'emancipated' Western world can be just as repressed and restrictive as the East. For me, it took a period about which I knew nothing, and informed me, while at the same time entertaining me (and annoying my fiance, as I persisted in reading the funniest bits aloud to him.. I know, it's annoying).

The thing that I loved the most about this novel, was the emphasis on books and education. I completely agree with Satrapi when she says 'One must educate oneself'. And on that note, I'm off to rent the film...

Rating: ***** (I'd give it more if I had them!)