is Nobokov’sLolita, a story about a young girl who has essentially been absorbed into a much older man’s life. Readers only know Lolita through Humbert; in much the same way, these women are only known through the men around them. Lolita is both a “vulgar insensitive minx” and a lonely orphaned girl—and for the duration of the novel she lives in utter helplessness and dependence. While vastly different in many ways, these women are in much the same situation as this twelve-year-old fictional girl. Only a few of them have the actual book because it is banned by the government; all three hundred pages have been copied from an annotated edition.

The women in this group meet in to preserve their individuality in a world that punishes it. They are all plagued with nightmares about getting caught by the government doing things that are no longer permitted. Azi fears being caught hosting this gathering with forbidden books. Despite their fears and their marked differences, they are able to connect in ways nothing else in the country allows:

It created and shaped our intimacies, throwing us into unexpected complexities.... I constantly felt as if I was being undressed in front of perfect strangers.

They keep journals and write poetry that yearns for things women of their generation did not experience:

stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin.

Gatsby

Azi recounts her journey back to a very different Tehran than the one she left seventeen years before. Her father was the former mayor of Tehran who was jailed as a dissident, which changed her life forever. She married young and quickly, knowing she would divorce even on her wedding day. She traveled with him to America and studied literature at a university in Oklahoma. When she returned to her home country, she was stunned at the changes she saw. In fact, before she even left the airport in Tehran she was pulled aside, interrogated, and inspected—while her husband was left untouched and unnoticed.

As a university student in the United States, Azi had participated in her share of protests and demonstrations. As a professor of literature at the University of Tehran, she tries to maintain some continuity for her classes at a time when every day there are deaths or revolutionary calls to cancel (boycott) classes. The battle between the leftists and Islamics is being played out on university campuses. In this environment, where revolutionary writings are sold and debated in the hallways, Azi is armed with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby and the simple desire to teach. She sees both Twain and Fitzgerald as revolutionaries and wants to explore these concepts with her students. She meets both resistance and acceptance for her teaching, but her classes become enormously popular.

Gatsby is a novel that captures the American Dream, the hopefulness of a future filled with love—the antithesis of this culture, which looks back and worships what has gone before. It is a difficult semester, interrupted by protests and demonstrations and killings; no one is immune from governmental scrutiny. One of Azi’s students respectfully expresses his view that reading Gatsby is a negative influence because it teaches American values. It is “immoral” and it poisons their minds. Azi decides to place the novel on trial; the students will be judge, jury, and lawyers. No one will advocate the novel by acting as Gatsby, so Azi plays him in the trial. It becomes the Islamic Republic of Iran against The Great Gatsby, and not only is the book on trial but Azi’s philosophy and literature itself is being tested. It begins as a heated discussion about morality but ends as a commentary on the nature of literature:

A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic—not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so.

Azi’s personal realization after teaching Gatsby is that they are on the same self-destructive path as Gatsby is—trying to fulfill a dream by living in the past only to find that “the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future.”

The spring semester is difficult. After shutting down most forms of nongovernment publishing, the government targets the universities. Only a few classes are offered; instead, both professors and students march and protest to keep the university open. They do not prevail. Some students are killed or have simply “disappeared,” and the faculty still shows up but do not teach.

James

War broke out on September 23, 1980: “unexpected, unwelcome, and utterly senseless.” Schools are to open the next day, but they do not. The war lasted nearly eight years.

The rules have changed, and Azi and her female colleagues must now wear veils. All but three conform. Despite people’s pleading to simply see it as a “piece of cloth,” Azi knows that wearing the veil is giving up who she is, and she is unwilling to do that. Knowing it is only a matter of time before she is expelled, Azi visits a bookstore and eagerly buys all the classic and soon-to-be-banned literature she can find. On her taxi ride home, as she ponders her selections, she decides not to show up at university, which will give her much more time to read her selections. Soon the veil is required for all women in all places, not just the universities. Azi realizes two things have irrevocably changed her life in Tehran: the war and being fired. The former took away her freedoms and identity as a woman; the latter took away her professional identity as a teacher and a writer, leaving her with a “feeling of unreality.” Her husband is a stabilizing force for Azi, relatively unaffected by the new regime and its restrictions. They have two children, born in 1984 and 1985, and Azi’s new obsession is keeping them safe.

She joins a small group of fellow academics who gather once a week in each other’s homes to study classical Persian literature. They are reminded of the truth and beauty of their country and its history—this provides a sharp contrast to the country as revealed in the expurgated and rewritten texts since the revolution. She begins her Iranian writing career, mostly with literary criticism, but it leaves her unsatisfied. Impulsively one day she calls Professor R, someone she refers to as her “magician,” a former university professor of drama who shares her ideals and is rather a reclusive muse for those who stand in opposition to the ideals of the revolution and the subsequent transformations of Iran. They discuss literature and politics and philosophy, he the master and she the student; their several meetings a week help her maintain and strengthen her views regarding freedom and tyranny in the world of literature and life.

By the mid-eighties a change has occurred in Iran. The war has gone on too long, and many of the young revolutionaries are disillusioned by the resulting corruption in leadership. The universities are beginning to call back their more free-thinking professors, who were once called progressives and are now called reformers. After a meeting with her magician, Azi realizes her reluctance to teach is selfish, adding to the common national belief that “anything that gives pleasure is bad, and is immoral.” Azi re-enters the classroom at Allameh Tabatabai University; this time she is wearing the requisite veil. She is afraid she will have to make too many compromises, and the university is afraid she may be too much of a risk; but they both move forward.

Things are different, as she was promised, but things are also still the same. This is the period of her life in which Daisy Miller by Henry James is her guidepost. She has much to be afraid of; but like Daisy, she is determined not to be afraid. The bombings begin again in the spring of 1988, and fear is pervasive. In fact, as many as a quarter of the population of Tehran has evacuated the city. Classes at the university have moved to the second floor. Yet Azi continues to teach her beloved Henry James. He lived through both the Civil War and World War I; though he fought in neither, he was certainly displaced and dismayed by it. He believed the only way to effectively protest the social condition was to “constantly express one’s perfect dissatisfaction with it,” and that is what he did in his life and in his writing.

In fiction, Azi believes, the lack of empathy is the worst villainy; this lack of empathy by the regime is the root of its great evil. “Life in death” is the apparent goal of the government, and it is succeeding. The people regularly curse both Saddam Hussein and the Iranian regime. A cease-fire is negotiated. It lasts two days. As the war continues, the regime is forced to relax its grip on vices such as women wearing make-up, improperly wearing their veils, and making any kind of contact with men who are not related to them. This results in a sense of freedom until Saddam unleashes a previously only whispered-about chemical bomb on a Kurdish town in his own country, and fear returns. Two months later, the war ends as unexpectedly as it began.

Classes resume, minus a few faces but with the addition of a few others. The tenor of the discussion changes. The regime is still in power but its voice is no longer as powerful. Ayatollah Khomeini dies less than a year later. While opponents of the regime are forced to bury their dead in secret because their cemeteries have been razed, he was buried in state during a period of national mourning. Many attend only because they feel they should, while others are truly in mourning for this direct descendant of Muhammed. Although life in Tehran drifts back into some normalcy, many are disillusioned and the young revolutionaries are now without a cause and powerless. Azi says:

When I think of how their talents were wasted, my resentment grows for a system that either physically eliminated the brightest and most dedicated or forced them to lay waste to the best in themselves, transforming them into ardent revolutionaries...or hermits.

On the first day of class Azi is surprised to see Nassrin, a student from her former university. Then Nassrin had been a precocious thirteen-year-old absorbing everything she could; seven years later she is still an excellent student who has endured much suffering, including prison.

Austen

The literature group, comprising students from both of Azi’s university experiences, gathers with some trepidation. In their discussion of Pride and Prejudice, marriage inevitably becomes the focus. Their disgust at the new law allowing temporary marriages is just beginning when Sanaz arrives with the news that she and her longtime “sweetheart” Ali are finally going to marry. Although she has not seen him for six years, she is going to Turkey to meet him and become formally engaged. One of the girls says Sanaz must dance with her young man to test their compatibility, a notion which reminds Azi of the symbolic nature of dance in Austen’s work and particularly in Pride and Prejudice. The give and take between Darcy and Elizabeth throughout the novel is like one extended, intricate dance.

Life in the Islamic Republic of Iran is still oppressive to women, and their

dilemmas, regardless of their backgrounds and beliefs, were shared, and stemmed from the confiscation of their most intimate moments and private aspirations by the regime.

Although each of these women shares a disillusion with things as they are in Tehran, they are able to relax and be themselves during their Thursday morning literature group.

As the decade of the ’90s begins, there are two sides of this country—“the one of words and the one of reality.” Peace and reform are the promise but continued corruption and terror are the reality. The interests of those in power come before the interests of the people—at any cost. Slowly, though, the battle over the culture was being won by the secular faction. Philosophy, literature, and the arts are looking increasingly to Western culture; and the youth, the children of the revolution, are defecting to this more progressive thinking. Previously banned books are now being published and made available; ironically, the same ideas and philosophies they once vilified are now the cause of questioning and rethinking among many former revolutionaries. Azi believes “our society was far more advanced than its new rulers.”

Sanaz has returned from her engagement trip and is blissful but regretful that she and Ali shared so little time together because the family was constantly around them. Two weeks later, Sanaz comes to Azi’s for the usual group meeting and recounts the news that Ali called her from London to break the engagement—probably because of another woman. His excuses were myriad and all seemingly centered around her welfare; however, Azi sees him as a coward, and all of them commiserate with her. When Azi visits her magician and once again blames the revolution and the regime for the oppression of women, he tells her she must not encourage these young women in their victimhood; instead, she must continue to show them how to “fight for their happiness.” He tells her to quit focusing on the regime and refocus on her Austen, which she does. But they both know her time in Tehran is coming to an end.

Several of the girls are still struggling with the issues of marriage. Azi wants to leave the husband who beats her, but she knows she will never get custody of her young daughter if she tries and she needs her husband’s permission to do anything but kill herself. After her broken engagement, Sanaz is dating regularly and finding little to love. Because these women are progressive thinkers in so many ways, most of them, including Azi, are yearning to leave this oppressive place. Mahshid quietly asks, “Who will help make something of this country” if everyone leaves?

One day Nassrin confesses to Azi that she may be in love. Nassrin is older and rather perplexed by her feelings; she understands the intricacies of philosophy and literature, but she is a virtual stranger to the matters of love and real relationships:

Love was forbidden, banished from the public sphere. How could it be experienced if its expression was illegal?

Writers are once again being persecuted: threatened, expelled from the country, mysteriously missing, tortured, and even killed. The official reports of their deaths do not match the physical evidence, and the writing community is again becoming afraid.

One day Azi is having tea with her magician in a pastry shop, explaining that she is trying to show her girls the realities of the West, which they tend to see as a perfect place. Suddenly there is a commotion, and the proprietor encourages the two of them to quickly separate because they are not related and would most certainly find themselves a target of the patrol. Azi refuses to move, but the magician moves to protect her. Azi is allowed to leave unmolested, but the raid makes her physically ill. She ponders the cruelties of man even in the novels of Austen: greed, falsehood, vanity, disloyalty, hurt, and cruelty. The only way to survive individual cruelties is to act as an individual. For Azi, that means leaving Iran.

She and Bijan (and their families) discuss and argue interminably, but they will go. The magician approves of the decision; the girls of the literature club are afraid of what the loss will mean to them. Azi hopes they will each create their own workshops, continuing the model she has set for them. Instead, most are also thinking of leaving. Nassrin comes to visit unexpectedly and announces she will be moving secretly (because she is unable to get a passport) to London. “She said she was twenty-seven now and didn’t know what it meant to live.” Her time in jail was not the most difficult thing she had to endure, and she wants more for her life. The reaction in the group is mostly supportive, but now nearly all of them feel they must leave. They explain that Azi, their teacher and role model, has shown them they must leave. Azi demurs, but they understand freedom may ultimately mean leaving. Even their faith may not be enough to keep them here. Azi explains her own fears about leaving, and the workshop is over. Mahshid hands Azi a parting gift from Nassrin—a folder in which every one of Azi’s lectures Nassrin had attended for three entire semesters was transcribed verbatim—the jokes, the anecdotes, the philosophy, the passion.

In the weeks before she left, Azi grows nostalgic and is obsessed with capturing places and people in photographs. She meets her girls in random places, preparing to say good-bye. She grows nostalgic in her last meeting with her magician and shares her view that one more item should be added to the Bill of Rights:

the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative words without any restrictions.

Epilogue

On June 24, 1997, the Nafisi family left Iran. Azi still writes and still teaches: “I have left Iran, but Iran did not leave me.” Things are a bit less restrictive in Iran, but the people still yearn for freedom. Azi wonders if her magician was real, but she knows he was. Nassrin arrived safely in England but nothing more is known of her. Mitra did get her visa to Canada and is pursuing a free life with her husband. Sanaz is married, and Azin has married once again. She is living in California and is happy.

Several of the girls continued meeting, and a few started their own literary workshops. Mahshid is now a senior editor and is writing her own books. Yassi is now working on her PhD in Texas. Manna still writes poetry.