Reading Lolita in Tehran

reading lolita in tehran

personal

"do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth" (3)

"Yaasi was shy by nature, but certain things made her lose her inhibitions" (4)

"Only there is no room, just the teasing void of memory" (7)

"my nomadic and borrowed life"(7)

"we felt their presence only through the disembodied noises emanating from below" (8)

"understood each other at the first word, since they had words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or catapult with wondrous consequences" (20) Nabokov

"every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you the freedomes that reality denies. in all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of life, an essential defiance." (47)



other
"each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self" (6)

"But to steal the words from Humbert, the poet/criminal of Lolita, I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we won't really exist if you don't. Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn't dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments, in the most extraordinarily ordinary circumstances of life, listening to music, falling in lvoe, walking down th shading streets or reading Lolita in Tehran."(6)

colors of my dreams (11)

private gestures interpreted in political terms (25)

we tried to live in the open spaces, in teh chinks created between that room, which had become our protective cocoon, and the censor's world of witches outside. (26)

imagination shapes vision and identity, what occurs outside the room (26)

liking small things

"in some perverse way, the physical punishment was a source of satisfaction to her, a compensation for having yielded to those other humiliations"

"but my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind that they had never felt on their skin. this generation had no past. their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. it was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry." (76)

German thinker Theodor Adorno: "the highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's home." I explained that the most great works of imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they feel too immutable

Fitzgerald in Conrad's preface to The nigger of the Narcissus: 'artists appeal to our capcity for delight nad wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.. and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds men to each other, which binds together all humaity -- the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

Mike Gold, Marxism

"A novel is not an allegory; I said as the period was about to come to an end. 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." (111)

"A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil..."(133)

fitzgerald - absolution - "honesty of imagination"

"as i walked thsoe dearly beloved, dearly remembered streets, I felt I was squashing the memories that lay underfoot." (145)

"turn their small corner into a sanctuary" (169)

four quartets, eliot

Baudelaire - "Le Fleurs du Mal - "Hypocrite, lecteur, -- mon semblable, -- mon frere!"

Diderot - Jacques le Fataliste
Racine -

shadows of a conditional smile

Bertolt Brecht - poem

balance between public private in p&p

bellow, mandelstam, sinyavsky,

"she felt secure only in her terrible sense of insecurity." (29)

list

nabokov

scheherazade, a thousand and one nights
llose, aunt julia and the scriptwriter

muriel spark - loitering with ntent


reflections:

- polyphonic voice of many novels
- reader/writer redressing quotations in new context, giving words new meaning, contrast/foil of like and unlike -- similar situation, accurate context? is new context accurate?
- mythicizing experience - regime is mythicizing
- recalls personal memories - tacos' passion

Booklist 2005

The O. Henry Prize Stories
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
The Oxford Book of Love Stories
Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas
La Petite Fadette, Georges Sand
Mary Queen of Scots Biography
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
The Steppe and other Short Stories, Anton Chekhov
Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa
Fast Food Nation
Wuthering Heights (reread), Emily Bronte
Boundaries, Maya Lin
Nietzsche
Montaigne
*Perpetua and Gargantua, Rabelais
*Of Man, Thomas Hobbes
The Prince, Machiavelli
*In Praise of Folly, Erasmus
*Meditations, Descartes
*Candide, Voltaire
Survival, Margaret Atwood
The Intimate Life of L. M. Montgomery, Irene Gammel
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, J. K. Rowling
span style="font-weight:bold;">In Praise of Shadows (reread), Tani?
Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert
Therese Raquin, Emile Zola
Le Proces de Marie Antoinette
Snow Falling on Cedar
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
Le Fantome de l'Opera, Gaston Leroux
Paris, Ile de France
Le Fantome de l'Opera, Gaston Leroux
Emma, Jane Austen
Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

This book made me ill, literally. I lugged it home excitedly for reading week ... I had wanted to read it since I saw the poster with my friend at Indigo, and we thought it resembled The Handmaid's Tale. But it was always, always signed out at the library.

Oryx and Crake is a biotech dystopia. Elite biotechnological companies (such as for genetically modified foods) and their employees live in exclusive guarded cities with all amenities; exit to the outside world is controlled, betraying company secrets result in horrible deaths. Crake, the narrator's childhood best friend with whom he played at various computer games and hacks, becomes a mastermind in one such company, and even designs his own human species which he keeps hidden in a dome. Oryx, a child porn star whom Crake and the narrator love, is brought in to nurture the people. Crake's plan fails (or was it his plan to fail?) and we find the narrator in a primitive world, charged with taking care of "the children of Oryx and Crake."

I didn't find neither the plot nor the writing style half as captivating as The Handmaid's Tale. There was something compelling about Offred's voice, about the circular narrative that's perhaps incomplete, about the nostalgic wordplay that isn't present in Oryx and Crake. We still have Margaret Atwood wit. But Snowman's post-apocalyptical flotsam isn't Offred's regime: Snowman is just any man, Offred is ... a woman, a Eurydice, calling with a haunting voice from the dark.

And too, somehow a genetically modified pig is more unappetizing than cloaked figures hung on The Wall.

I ran through Oryx and Crake in 5 hours one night, and my copy of the novel stank of liniment. It made me ill with a sniffly snuffly cold for the rest of the week.

Booklist 2004

Selected Journals of LMM v.4, L. M. Montgomery
Emilie de la Nouvelle Lune [Emily of New Moon translation], L. M. Montgomery
The Odyssey, Robert Farthes (?) *
Oresteia, Aeschylus *
Delight in Architecture, ______ *
Great Dialogues of Plato *
The Philosophy of Aristotle *
Shirley, Charlotte Bronte
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
De quoi m'ennuie toi, Eveline?, Gabrielle Roy
Aeneid, Virgil *
Satyricon *
Metamorphoses *
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
The English Patient, Michael Ondatje
Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
J'ai quinze ans et je ne veux pas mourir suivi par Il n'est pas si facile a vivre, Christine Arthony
Harry Potter et l'Ecole de Sorciers, J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter et la Chambre des Secrets, J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter et le Prisonnier D'Akazaban, J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter et la Coupe de Feu, J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter et l'Ordre de la Phoenix, J. K. Rowling
Lives of Mothers and Daughters, growing up with Alice Munro, Sheila Munro
Dance on the Earth, Margaret Lawrence
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Notre Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Confessions of St. Augustine

* signifies course [school] reading
italics indicate non-fiction works | standard print indicates fiction

Booklist 2003

The Piano Man's Daughter, Timothy Findley
Tess of the Dubervilles, H. Hardy(?)
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
My Dear Mr. M., letters to G. B. MacMillan, L. M. Montgomery
The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer Dixon
Elske, Cynthia Voigt
Goldengrove Unleaving, Jill Paten Walsh
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
The Waves (re-attempt), Virginia Woolf
Making Avonlea, Irene Gammel
A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L'Engle
Enchanted Summer, Gabrielle Roy
A Recipe for Bees, Gail Anderson Dargatz
Storyteller*
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, G. M. Marquez *
Waterland, John _______ *
The Ogre, Micheal Tournier *
Letters to Ephraim Weber, L. M. Montgomery
Periodic Table, Primo Levi *
Shoah, Claude _______ *
Maus, Art Speigelman *
L. M. Montgomery and the Mystique of Muskoka, Sylvia duVernet

* signifies course [school] reading
italicized signifies non-fiction works | standard print signifies fictional works

Booklist 2002

I hardly remember everything I read this year. There's probably much more.

The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien (reread)
Streets of Riches, Gabrielle Roy
The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shield
Childhood, Alexander _____
Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood
The Quest of the Holy Grail
Innocence and Experience: Essays and Conversations on Children's Literature
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad *
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Hidden Mountain, Gabrielle Roy
Where Nests the Water Hen, Gabrielle Roy
The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell
Essays, Henry Thoreau
Best of Alice Munro, Alice Munro
Frankenstein, Mary Shelly *
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

* signifies course [ school ] reading