Reading Reading Lolita

Recently, I finished the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. In this book Azar Nafisi, a literature professor, tells the story of her life in Iran during the Islamic revolution of the late 70's. She uses her experience teaching the works of Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, Austen, Bellow and others to help explain her reactions to the changes occurring in the country. The book makes clear that in the modern era a religious ideology supported by reactionary people can gain mass and insidiously erode the civil rights of a troubled, though relatively progressive monarchy, to the point where it becomes an unrecognizable shadow of itself. In fits and starts, sometimes in bold leaps, at other times in barely recognizable increments, the disgruntled people of Iran allowed a revolution to occur which failed them, as it stripped the country of its former secular identity.

No matter what one thinks of the Western literary canon as a standard for great literature, or one's feelings about the U.S. meddling in the affairs of a vulnerable state in order to further its own end, this book is an important record of the way freedoms can be diminished and then obliterated when religious ideology is allowed to insert itself into government.

Scary, and a little too much foreshadowing for my comfort.