by Azar Nafisi
Meeting Date: March 26, 2010
Hostess: Lynne (at the pub)
Discussion: The first questions we talked about were not so much about the book itself but were questions that Nafisi raised with her students: why do we read? what is the purpose of fiction? Overall we tended to agree that we read to escape; to experience something that we might not otherwise have the chance to experience. We also read for enjoyment and to learn new things. We read to be able to contrast one 'reality' with another - to discover what is reality for each of us. By way of explanatory example, we related to Nafisi telling her "girls" about America. For all intents and purposes this was 'fantasy' to the girls but not because Nafisi's tales were fictional. But they were able to take her experiences and her stories and try to relate it both to their lives in Iran and to the other stories that they were being told about the 'reality' of the Western world by their politicians and sometimes their own families - thereby maybe coming up with their own reality.
Generally, most people agreed that it was a difficult book to read. In particular with the opening section being "Lolita" we found it difficult to get interested in the book, especially if we had not read the book "Lolita" by Nabokov. Whereas, several of us agreed that by the time we got to the section on "Austen" that was the part that made the book worthwhile and more what we were expecting. We noted that this was done purposefully by the author, as the story does not flow chronologically from Lolita to Austen.
In Austen there is more of a discussion of the lives of the women in Iran and comparing them with the characters that Austen wrote about. Lolita, we felt was more of the author's critique not only of the book "Lolita" but also a critique of other literary critiques of Lolita. However, this was not a unanimous opinion of the first section, and some people did find the challenge of the Lolita discussion quite engaging and forced the reader to think about ...(I don't know something, something; Dannette do you want to jump in here? the juxtaposition of the subtext that is thought provoking; you lost me!).
We did discuss the comparison of the rape of the 12-year old Lolita with the legal age for marriage in Iran being lowered from 18 to 9 and although the author does not make this point outright, some felt that this was her purpose in focusing on this book. There were other comparisons that we made about the lives of the young women in Iran, who had no point of reference to life prior to the revolution, such as there lack of agency and their overarching control by males in their lives, just like Lolita. In terms of agency, we did discuss the women's ability to resist and we compared this to the women in "A Thousand Splendid Suns".
We had very little discussion of Gatsby & James. These sections seemed less to grab us either because they were less compelling or we disliked them. Again, while a few people had read The Great Gatsby, not many of us were familiar with many works of Henry James. In retrospect, laying in my bed later that night, I realized I had wanted to bring up the 'magician' and I was uncertain about this person and his relationship with the author. I regret that we did not discuss it.
We discussed the idea of 'characters' and really there were no favourite characters. We did talk about the difficulty that many of us had of keeping the identities of the 'girls' straight. We questioned whether it was because their names were not terribly familiar to us or if it is because we really did not have enough personal details to distinguish who was who.
We were split as to whether we would recommend the book or not, with 3 saying no and 3 saying yes.
Ratings:
Dannette ................8
Barb .......................5.5
Lynne ......................4
Christina .................6
Rebecca .................7.5
Stacey ...................abstain
Natalie .................did not finish reading it
Overall: 6.2
No comments:
Post a Comment