‘Lolita’ in Colorado Springs: Iranian author to speak at CC

Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling book “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” is in Colorado Springs this week to give a free lecture at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Gates Common Room, located in Palmer Hall, 1025 N. Cascade Ave., on the Colorado College campus (389-6607). Why all the fuss? Read on:

Who cares? Political junkies and literary junkies alike. “Reading Lolita in Tehran” (2003) spent 117 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and has been translated into 32 languages.

What is the book about?

Think of this book as a real-life “Dead Poets Society” set in Tehran, with women in the secret circle instead of men.

Nafisi’s book is a blend of memoir, literary criticism and history in post-revolution Iran. She explores her time as a professor in Tehran until she resigned her post in 1995; the women she then invited into her home for a secret study of banned Western literature; and the books that shaped her and her students.

The stories of classic characters’ struggles against oppression mingle with the women’s fight against the repressive regime in Iran. This cadre of smart women gives Westerners an intimate glimpse of a culture most of us know little about.

“There, in that living room,” Nafisi wrote, “we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom.”

What is Nafisi doing now? She left Iran in 1997 and is now a visiting fellow and lecturer at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. She’s working on two books — “The Republic of the Imagination,” about the power of literature to liberate minds and peoples, and “Things I Have Been Silent About,” a memoir about her mother that will be published in fall 2008.

What do her critics say? Nafisi endured a blistering attack last year from Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, who accused her of being a closet neoconservative. He charged that “Reading Lolita in Tehran” was a propaganda tool to demonize modern Iran and justify an American attack.

Nafisi found his charges not worthy of response, and the furor quickly passed.

Our favorite quote from ‘Lolita’: “I left Iran, but Iran did not leave me.”