The book has lots of characters, mostly people Ms. Nafisi has met at the University, students or colleagues. There are so many of them that I occasionally lost track of one or the other (a thing that doesn’t happen to me very often). To my deep chagrin, I cannot say I got an accurate image not even of the author’s private students, “her girls” as she uses to call them. I can of course say their names and I do remember a thing or two on most of them (especially Nassrin, she was my favorite for some reason), but on the whole I cannot present an accurate characterization on any of them, not even a sketchy one. There are very few characters I can actually venture to write about. I have liked of course the author herself (although we see her mostly in the lights of her experiences, naturally enough she does not talk very much about herself), her husband Bijan also seemed a nice enough chap, and, my favorite of them all, the one the author calls “my magician”, an ex-teacher to a Tehran university too, a guy that seems to always have the ability to say the very thing that needs saying at any given moment.

This is probably a very shallow thing to say, but I was amazed at how unfair life was for women in Tehran in that particular period. They could face imprisonment for one year if they were caught painting their nails! Every single day was filled with little (or less so) nagging things, ranging from having to wear the veil, to being given an inferior room in a restaurant when unaccompanied by men, to being imprisoned for the slightest offenses and being given forced virginity tests. I have a hard time even trying to imagine such a life and I cannot help feeling sorry for the life the poor girls had to endure back then (some of it even now actually, from what I have understood the morals are being more lax now but not nearly the way they are in the US or Europe, the way I think they should be).
Here is a quote I have thought to be representative of the situation:

I wonder if right now, at this moment, I were to turn to the people sitting next to me in this café in a country that is not Iran and talk to them about life in Tehran, how they would react. Would they condemn the tortures, the executions and the extreme acts of aggression? I think they would. But what about the acts of transgression on our ordinary lives, like the desire to wear pink socks?

What I liked most:  All the parallels made (or the contrasts evidenced) between life in Iran and the books the author chose to talk about. Actually, every single bit that spoke about books was very interested for me, opening up new vistas and perspectives, even on books I (used to think I) knew quite well. Speaking of which, I am fairly certain Ms. Nafisi’s students are very lucky to have her as their teacher, she seems to love books, and open them up to interpretation very well also.

As an example of the parallels previously, mentioned, here’s something about the very Lolita:

Take Lolita. This was the story of a twelve-year-old girl who had nowhere to go. Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy, into his dead love, and he had destroyed her. The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another. We don’t know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel, the finished work, is hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life, ordinary everyday life, all the normal pleasures that Lolita, like Yassi, was deprived of.

a comparison made even more pregnant later, by saying about “her [the author's] girls”:

Throughout, from start to finish, I observe that they have no clear image of themselves; they can only see and shape themselves through other people’s eyes-ironically, the very people they despise.

Just like Lolita is only seen through the eyes of the narrator only. We don’t know her absolutely, only reflected in Humbert’s eye. As the author put it:

“Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such, she becomes a double victim: not only her life but also her life story is taken from her. We told ourselves we were in that class to prevent ourselves from falling victim to this second crime.”

It’s this kind of passages that were my absolute favorites, making me discover new angles when it came to both books and life in Tehran.

Also, there are two other quotes that I have absolutely loved and agreed with:

We in ancient countries have our past-we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

While this is an absolutely novel thought for me, having never crossed my head, I can nevertheless see its truth (especially as I am not an American so I have first-hand experience of this “obsessing over the past” the author talks about).
And the one, this time about reading:

A novel is not an allegory [...]. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience.

I think its pretty obvious why I like it so much :)

What I liked least: Something that is not necessarily a fault of the book’s but my own. Each of the four parts of the book takes place in a different time, without respect to the chronology. Every now and then the author recounted scenes that happened before or were to happen later, between the moment of recollection and the book being published. All this going back and forth had me confused every now and then, especially as I had no idea about the history of Iran and the order of the actual events.

Recommend it? All throughout reading it (despite my occasional getting lost in characters and events) I had the feeling it was a very well written book. A reason enough for me to recommend it :)


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