BOW: READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN

Happy Sunday! Well, between the holiday and a hectic work schedule (and, if I'm being completely honest with you, a slight albeit unjustifiable discomfort with nonfiction), it took me a bonus week--oops!--but I finally wrapped up Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, the basic gist of this New York Times Bestseller is a collection of ruminations from a female professor of English Literature living in the controversial and at times tyrannical Islamic Republic of Iran. When I first started the book--and I will confess, I actually started this book once before several years ago but couldn't get past the first 30 pages or so (again, thanks to my general awkwardness around nonfiction)--I presumed that it was going to be a rather linear story revolving around Ms. Nafisi's book club, which consisted of seven diverse Iranian women united by their passion and commitment to literature. While this group dominates the memoir's first section (including those 30 pages I read a few years back), the novel as a whole has a much more meandering structure, loosely organized into four sections that link to four novelists: Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. Each section reminisces on Nafisi's experiences teaching one of these talented Western authors in revolutionary Iran, suggesting how--unlikely as it might seem at first glance--each of them provide incredibly salient lessons.

While I did find Nafisi's insights on each of these authors to be truly illuminating, and while I appreciated the overarching theme of novels as arbiters of empathy in their uniquely democratic form, this meandering structure I mentioned became a real hindrance...Nafisi talks about truly horrendous instances of radical Islam's war on individuality with artful precision, and portrays the power of fiction with an equally impressive ease, but in spite of all this interesting content, the book moved slowly, weaving back and forth between conversations and internal thoughts, past and present, this event and that, so that it was all rather fuzzy and jumbled and--if I'm being honest, a little repetitive, too. This serpentine and at times redundant approach slightly tarnishes Nafisi's eloquent prose, but the overall message of the novel's transformative potential is still wonderful and worth reading.

So what's on the docket next week? I am thrilled to announce I will be reading Gourmet Rhapsody, by the divine Muriel Barbery--that's right, the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, meaning she can do no wrong in my book! I'm really hoping this book will surprise and delight in the same way her previous work has. Check back next week to find out!