While discussion online and in Europe (there is very little mention of it in the American press) may be raging over Michael Maar's claim to have discovered an original German source for Lolita, in America the big Nabokov story is Reading Lolita in Tehran. According to Publisher's weekly, the original hardcover run of the book yielded a miniscule 2% return rate on the original 90,000 copies Random House shipped. Early interviews on NPRs Fresh Air and in the New York Times helped boost hardcover sales. When the book went to paperback , word of mouth and the support of independent booksellers kept it a favorite until rising to its current rank of #1 on the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller list. Nafisi, an engaging and passionate speaker often draws crowds of up to 150 people at in-store book signings. Independent booksellers report increased sales of the "classics" mentioned in the memoir, including, of course, Lolita. Publishers Weekly predicts that Reading Lolita in Tehran will be one of the year's top selling nonfiction paperbacks. The book is popular with book clubs, college classes and what is often termed the "reading public". Below is a posting to the literary blog, Books for Readers illustrating how the success of Reading Lolita in a Tehran; A Memoir in Books changes readers' perceptions of Nabokov. Newsletter # 46 July 11, 2003 I have not yet finished Azar Nafisi's READING LOLITA IN TEHERAN, but I was inspired to try one of the books she discussed? INVITATION TO A BEHEADING by Vladimir Nabokov. Nafisi is a big fan of Nabokov, but he has never been my favorite? such a high priest of art, full of an aristocratic playfulness, and all those endless language games! These are not things that are simpatico to my lower- middle-class nature. I believe there really are temperamental differences in how individuals and also classes of people approach the world. Thus, Nabokov has always made me feel pedestrian, quotidian, and generally too serious. I was raised in a home where the Word was valued as the place to discover the rules for living? certainly the Word as it appears in the Bible, but by extension the word in schoolbooks, in newspapers, and in novels as well. This is the lead-up to saying that I was totally blown away by sad, comic INVITATION TO A BEHEADING. There are a few too many golden hairs on white dancer's calves and tiny plump hands in elegant gloves and quivering blonde moustaches? but after a few pages you begin to feel that you have been privileged to enter the dream of someone with an imagination of truly magnificent vitality. The novel's storyline follows the psychological tortures leading up to the main character's ceremony of execution in punishment for the crime of being, it appears, different from the crowd. It is a bizarrely inspiring and upbeat story. You have to give yourself over to it? but I'm so glad I did. I guess now I have to reread and read more Nabokov. Nafisi has been interviewed extensively throughout the year and she is often asked to comment on Nabokov. This year's VNCollation, assembles many of these questions along with her responses into a loose interview. I have noted the sources should you be interested in original context In some cases I have included multiple responses to essentially the same question where her answer was different enough to warrant it. For further interviews see: http://www.artlives.org/resource_guide.html For a listing of reviews see: http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/nabokovv/lolita6.htm "When you think like that it's icky" A collated interview with Azar Nafisi When did Nabokov write "Lolita"? He wrote it in early `50s, and there was a great deal of scandal about it. He thought that he could never publish it under his own name, so at first, it was published in France. And then there was quite a furor over it in England and U.S. Then finally, Graham Greene gave it credibility by choosing it one of the best books he had read. Where is -- is Nabokov still alive? No, he died in Switzerland in 1977. Where was he from? Originally, he was from Russia, and he was born on the last year of 19th century, 1899, and he claimed that according to one Russian calendar, his birthday was the same as Shakespeare`s, the 23rd of April! What`s the story of "Lolita" about? The story of "Lolita" is about this very sophisticated, articulate European man, 38, who in his childhood falls in love with this girl, when he was 13, Annabelle Lee (ph), and she dies. And their love is never consummated. And ever since then, he becomes obsessed with the image of Annabelle Lee. And when he meets "Lolita" years later, he tries to turn that little girl into his dead Annabelle Lee. And he seduces and rapes her and keeps her under his yoke for two years, until she finally escapes. She was how old again, 12? She was 12. Does that have any relationship to the fact that in Tehran, you say, today, or in Iran, that men can marry a woman at age 9? Yes, they lowered -- after the revolution, they lowered the age of marriage from 18 to 9. And I always felt a 9-year-old girl, her life has not started yet, and when you marry her off to a man, like "Lolita," you are confiscating her childhood. And that is, to me, one of the biggest crimes. Brian Lamb, Book Notes June 8, 2003 The role of Nabokov's Lolita in your book is not what readers might expect from the title?a risque book in a sexually repressed society. For you and your students, Lolita was a kind of metaphor for the Islamic Republic. I wonder what kind of reaction readers have had to that?and particularly to your comparison between Humbert Humbert and Ayatollah Khomeini. Interestingly enough, when I talk about how the ayatollahs, by imposing their dreams on us, turning us into a figment of their imagination, did basically the same thing that Humbert did to Lolita, it seems to resonate with a lot of my American readers. And my students in Iran connected with Nabokov more than with any other writer. It's because of the kind of universe he created, in Lolita and in other books, in which the free individual always had to fend for herself or himself, and the biggest crime was confiscation of another person's reality. That was something that they connected with immediately. In one passage you actually compare life in Iran to a piece of bad fiction. Is that in a way what makes a tyranny so difficult to overcome, that it is so incoherent? People always think that living in a tyranny is a cohesive experience. But living under a tyranny?and Nabokov does an amazing job of illustrating this in Invitation to a Beheading?you don't suffer just from physical oppression. You suffer because the regime is so arbitrary. Living in the U.S., when you wake up in the morning you know accidents could happen to you, but you sort of know what might happen when you go out into the street and go to work. In Iran, when you leave home you literally don't know what could happen to you. They might be very nice, very reasonable, or they might take you to jail. They live on that arbitrariness. They are not coherent, they only have the guns. And they are very scared of you. I try to make my American friends understand that when the fundamentalists flew into the World Trade Center, it was not merely because of their fear of the U.S., it was because of their fear of their own people wanting to become more democratic. When we in the free world think of totalitarianism, we normally think in terms of the suppression of dissidents, of the right to speak out and act out against the regime. Your description of the Islamic Republic shows how much deeper the repression went, that the regime dictated not just opinions, but emotions in every aspect of life?when and how you could express love or fear or grief. Can literature provide readers with a kind of substitute emotional life? There's a sentence by Nabokov, "Readers are born free and they ought to remain free." I wanted this book to be not just about authors, and freedoms of speech for authors, but about the freedom to read for readers, the freedom for readers to communicate with their authors, with the books that they choose to read. The most important lesson that we learned from the Islamic Republic, which connects directly to Nabokov and almost every single novel that he has written, is that freedom means nothing without first giving the individual the choice to fulfill himself or herself to the fullest of his or her potential. My generation didn't understand that. We were given this freedom. We didn't think about it. My daughter's generation has been going to jail for wearing lipstick in the streets. They have been flogged seventy-six lashes for not wearing the veil properly. They have been deprived of holding hands in public with the man they love. So love, personal emotions, personal choices, right now are at the center of the struggle for Iran. And one of the ways that we realized this, that we fought with our own inarticulateness, was through reading these books. Austen told us that a woman has the right to choose the man she wants to marry, against all authority. Nabokov taught us that people have a right to retrieve the reality that totalitarian mindsets have taken away from them. That is why works of imagination, especially fiction, have become so vital today in Iran. And I wish that Americans would understand that. Their gifts to us have been Lolita and Gatsby. Our gift to them has been reasserting those values that they now take for granted, reminding them that life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness belong to everyone. Elizabeth Wasserman, Atlantic Unbound, May 7, 2003 Often decried as a slightly seedy apology for paedophilia, Lolita is championed by these girls as a parable of their lives. Nabokov could have written about Stalin, but he didn't, he wrote about the totalitarian mind. Humbert was like Hitler, or Stalin. Now we call them monsters, but at the time, they were very seductive, especially to the Western elite. The tyrant's main crime is to impose his dream, his will on other people. That's the worst thing Humbert does, he takes away Lolita's potential. She can never hold hands with a boy her age, never find out who Lolita really is. That's exactly what happened to my students. Their choice about how to dress, how to be, was confiscated. The Times (London) February 21, 2004, Saturday Professor Nafisi, LOLITA? I mean, what's the polite thing to say? I guess professors like to say it lacks a moral center. At the very least it lacks a moral center. I have young girls and I find it icky looking at that book. But the students found this account of an old creep's rape of a 12 year old somehow evocative of their experience. When you think like that it's icky. I mean, that is the whole point that good literature can take something that is very sacred-- that is very profane and turn it into sacred and vice versa. A bad author can take the most moral-- issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue. The first page of Nabokov's novel s about the fact that he was in love with a young girl when he was 13. And that love is not consummated. So what does he do? He turns that unconsummated love into the dream and obsession of his life. And when he meets Lolita, he wants to turn Lolita into Annabelle Lee. The biggest crime in Nabokov's LOLITA is imposing your own dream upon someone else's reality. Humbert Humbert is blind. He doesn't see Lolita's reality. He doesn't see that Lolita should leave. He only sees Lolita as an extension of his own obsession. This is what a totalitarian state does. But Lolita, it's hard to understand that character because the author doesn't give you much of a sense of her own identity. The whole point is that Lolita, like my girls in Iran, would be constantly defined by their oppressors. And this is the heart-breaking part of LOLITA. And Nabokov is such a great writer that he makes you see it. He makes you see that even the name Lolita is a name that Humbert chooses for her because she's called Dolores in real life. And some people call her Dolly. But in his arms is always Lolita. And that is the heart-breaking aspect of these systems. That they make you so much yours-- theirs that-- that they rewrite you. And that is why fiction is so powerful because we rewrite them. When my girls wrote about their experiences in the Islamic Republic, the way they felt, they were rewriting what the Ayatollah had said. And they were revisiting it. And in this way, they were gaining over control over their life, and that is what Nabokov was doing. David Brancaccio, NOW PBS, June 23, 2003 Why was "Lolita," in particular, such a crucial book for your class? Of all the novels we read, "Lolita" was the most metaphorical of the situation in Iran. I felt the regime was imposing its dream on us. As women, it confiscated our reality. It said, "Don't be like this, be the way we think you should be." In Humbert's mind, Lolita had a precedent, a girl he meets when he's younger-- Annabel Leigh. Every girl he sees, he imposes his dream of Anna- bel on the reality of Lolita. The poignancy is that, as Humbert says, "Every night she had to run back to my arms, because she had nowhere else to go." My girls, in the Islamic Republic, where else did they have to go? Carla Power, Newsweek, May 6, 2003 Did you set out to write a "memoir in books"? Or is that what your work became? When I started writing this book, I did not think I would put so much of my own experiences into it. But as I started writing and thinking about these various authors, the circumstances [in Iran] became more alive in my memory. When I would talk about Lolita to audiences in the States [after she left Tehran for the US in 1997], people kept saying, "What does Lolita have to do with living in the Islamic Republic?" I had to explain the experience of [Humbert] wanting to take over this young girl's life and impose his own image upon her, and that's what Ayatollah Khomeini did to us. People have the right to live the way they want, even if they are like _Lolita_?a little vulgar and not high minded. I had to explain this constantly to my American audience, and without telling them about the kind of life we led in Iran, it was difficult telling them why Lolita became so important to us, and why, for example, 1984 was not as important. Dale Keiger, Scribble, Scribble,Scribble, March 28, 2003 Can you explain why you chose to write your book as a mixture of genres: autobiography, fiction and literary criticism? This idea came to me when I was writing my book on Nabokov in Persian [Anti-Terra: A Critical Study of Vladimir Nabokov's Novels]. I always had this preoccupation with the way reality and fiction mingle, the way that reality is transformed through fiction and vice versa. As I was working on the book, I kept thinking how wonderful it would be to write about all the different times, all the different stages in my life, when I was reading Nabokov. In the last chapter of Anti-Terra, I did a little bit of that. But in Iran I could not tell the truth about my life; not only in a political sense, but in a personal one. I wanted to explain, for example, how I first read Nabokov, but in order to do that I would have had to reveal that the person who gave me my first Nabokov was a man with whom I was very much in love. I did actually mention that in my Persian book, but my friends told me to cut it out! When I came to the States, I simply wrote the book that I had had in mind, but could not write, in Iran. Nermeen Shaikh AsiaSource, Jan 20, 2004 You have also written a book on Nabokov. That was my first book, actually. It was published in 1994. There were frustrations when I wrote that book?many things I wanted to talk about that I couldn't. [the book tour] It's been a liberating experience? [laughs] I know that people who read?a lot of people might buy a book and not like it?but those who continue with the conversation around this book are people who are interested in the same stuff [as I am]. And I am getting a lot of really?not positive feedback in terms of saying "Oh we love your book"?but in terms of the topics [covered in the book]. You mean Nabokov, James and Austen? Especially on Nabokov. I have had many people telling me about how they went back and reread Lolita. Robert Birnbaum, Identitytheory.com, Feb. 5, 2004 My highest point has been two interviews on NPR. [One] was about the concept of exile in literature, and Dmitri Nabokov also participated, bringing tears to my eyes, reading his father's poems, telling us what Nabokov missed of his country was the air and the trees and the skies of his homeland and more than anything else its language . . Azar Nafisi, Washington Post, July 6, 2003 What is your next project? Do you have something in mind? Well there are two projects. One is that I was hoping that the book I wrote on Nabokov would be translated into English as well (from Persian). Through Reading Lolita in Tehran, I am in touch with so many people who are interested in Nabokov, and I would like I would like my book to be made accessible to them in English. Nermeen Shaikh AsiaSource, Jan 20, 2004