Well ladies, it was my pleasure to host our first book club meeting ever at my place a few weeks ago and discuss Reading Lolita in Tehran. The discussion was stimulating, the company very enjoyable and the wine tasty (including Kyla's dad's black cherry wine - like candy!).
I won't try to capture all of our discussion, but here are some of my impressions of our conversation:
We discussed at length the idea of cultural perspective or lenses...How it's difficult (virtually impossible, some would say) to step into someone else's shoes without losing your cultural perspective, but also how distance from one's culture can give new perspective on it. Thus, by reading novels in Tehran through the narrator, we distanced ourselves from our traditional readings of them, and therefore read them in a new light.
Some readers felt cheated by the author's claim that this was a real novel, when in fact much of it was fabricated. We discussed why it is that we feel it is important for a novel to be "real" if it claims to be so, but also whether "real" exists...Again, we come back to the cultural lens.
The issue of being implicit in one's own fate was raised - just as the narrator chooses to wear the veil and yet deplores it, by the same token, she could have chosen NOT to wear it. We discussed whether we are truly the makers of our own destiny.
Many of us noted the author's strange detachment from her topic, even when depicting scenes and events that must have been traumatic. It was suggested that perhaps this was the only way for someone in these circumstances to deal with such daily trauma - to become frozen to it - or whether the author was suffering from post-traumatic stress. In fact many of us felt that it was strange to be reading about the upheaval in Iran through novels, as though that trivialized the topic. By the same token, these books became a safe haven for the people reading them, and reminded us of how lucky we are to live in a country where we can read (almost) whatever we want).
It was also iteresting that many of us in reading the book felt just as strangely detached from the topic as the author, and the question was raised as to whether this was a conscious decision on the author's part - to represent the feeling of daily shock that the author must have felt in the situation. Others felt that the novel's tone was too academic, and was written as an academic treatise rather than a novel...Perhaps this was a failure on the publisher or editor's part - promoting what is in fact an academic book as a novel.
In addition to the author's detachment from her topic, we discussed her escape from the world into the book club, and her criticism of the magician: by retreating from society, we felt that she was becoming more complicit in it and becoming more of a participant in her world. (one of us...we won't say who...suggested that the magician may not even exist, but most others felt that he does).
Penultimately: the book is one that makes you want to read other books. And even if you haven't read the books it mentions (Gatsby, Lolita, etc), you can still follow the plot and glean from it the impact that reading these books had on Nafisi's readers...Their questions about the role of the novel and its morality are ones that we may not ask ourselves when we are blessed with being able to read mostly whatever we want.
Finally (well, not finally, but this is all I can recall), we discussed that most of us were interested in the book club itself in the first chapter, but that this is lost in the rest of the book, even though that's what we thought the book was about...
Funnily enough, only one of us read the entire book. Three of us read the beginning, and one of us read the beginning and the end...All in all, it made for a great evening, and I'm looking forward to our March meeting, when Kristy will host our discussion of:
The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff
That's all for me, but if you all have any thoughts/oppositions/additions, feel free to add!
Ceebie
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