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reading (Reading Lolita in Tehran)
Aug. 28th, 2007 09:28 pmI finished "Reading Lolita in Tehran" last night.
I like how the history of the Iranian Revolution is written into the story. You don't have to know a whole lot of the history (or remember what you once knew) in order to understand the setting, the book brings up enough references to place you well in time.
I found the interpretation of life themes through authors' overriding themes to be sometimes spot on and sometimes tiring. One of the reasons people write fiction is because life, real life, doesn't often tie itself up into a neat little theme. Taking real life and squeezing it into a theme takes a lot of selective editing and some crunching. I wasn't thrilled with how it worked out overall.
It doesn't take much reading in this book to realize it was obviously written to a specific audience, whether conscious or not. I'm not a part of that audience, I was born with the wrong bits. I think some of the slant of the book kept it from making its best points. Could Ms. Nafisi see these conclusions and consciously choose to let them die on the vine? Or did she miss the implications in her own writing? This book has tons of inherent material, but I don't think it lived up to its potential.
Oh, here's a bit of advice: Did Nabokov, Austen and James use quotation marks to denote dialog? Do you really think you're twice as good as them, so you can use quotation marks only half of the time? Don't even think it. (Eek, I'm channelling one of my English teachers.)
58. Azar Nafisi "Reading Lolita in Tehran"
I like how the history of the Iranian Revolution is written into the story. You don't have to know a whole lot of the history (or remember what you once knew) in order to understand the setting, the book brings up enough references to place you well in time.
I found the interpretation of life themes through authors' overriding themes to be sometimes spot on and sometimes tiring. One of the reasons people write fiction is because life, real life, doesn't often tie itself up into a neat little theme. Taking real life and squeezing it into a theme takes a lot of selective editing and some crunching. I wasn't thrilled with how it worked out overall.
It doesn't take much reading in this book to realize it was obviously written to a specific audience, whether conscious or not. I'm not a part of that audience, I was born with the wrong bits. I think some of the slant of the book kept it from making its best points. Could Ms. Nafisi see these conclusions and consciously choose to let them die on the vine? Or did she miss the implications in her own writing? This book has tons of inherent material, but I don't think it lived up to its potential.
Oh, here's a bit of advice: Did Nabokov, Austen and James use quotation marks to denote dialog? Do you really think you're twice as good as them, so you can use quotation marks only half of the time? Don't even think it. (Eek, I'm channelling one of my English teachers.)
58. Azar Nafisi "Reading Lolita in Tehran"
