Azar Nafisi was born and raised in Iran, and her credentials as an Iranian woman and scholar are not in question. Her book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is a memoir of a certain part of her life lived in Iran, but many features of it are shared with historical travellers' accounts which can be seen as "exposing subtexts beneath the seemingly innocent details of travel to other lands that allow us to see more clearly the ways in which travelers [in this case a native Iranian, but speaking similarly] construct the cultures they experience. From travelers' accounts of their travels, we can trace the presence of Cultural elements, stereotypes and the way an individual reacts to what is seen elsewhere can reflect the tendencies of the traveler's culture of origin." (Bassnett 93, mine in brackets). It is this similarity to the tales of historical travelers that helps create the illusion that Dr. Nafisi only visited Iran, much as she called it home, and never truly felt at home there. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Roland Barthes, in his book Mythologies, wrote a short chapter on the “Writer on Holiday.” In it he pokes fun at the details newspapers give us about what famous writers do on holiday. It seems that Le Figaro loves recounting the details of writers' "vestimentary and gustatory functions" (Barthes 31), as if this humanized them and made them accessible to their readers. Barthes rebels against this by stating that "Far from the details of his daily life which bring me closer to the nature of his inspiration and make it clearer, it is the whole mythical singularity of his condition that the writer emphasizes with such confidences." (31) In Nafisi's work, she is quick to add details of food and clothing and, at certain times, details of houses and interiors. This oddity in writing, in a memoir filled with incomplete narratives of one's own and other people's lives, serves, one assumes, to bring the reader closer to the subject discussed and to understand it better. For example, we are told several times about the author's predilection for coffee ice cream, with coffee on top, with walnuts (Nafisi 314). He even says that this is his only way to deal with problems. Added to this are the detailed descriptions of his pupils' clothing when they first arrived at his home, and the care with which he dressed for that first day of class (12-18). With these details he attempts to humanize the girls, to make them real and recognizable to the reader, and not to simply make them "Iranian students". Interestingly, however, Nafisi gives us very incomplete information about each young woman, and it is quite difficult to distinguish them. Since none of their stories are told from the beginning (and perhaps this reader's unforgivable lack of familiarity with Persian names), it is easy to confuse the details. Was this intentional? Did Nafisi intend to strip them of their identity and “replace them with a code of [our] imagination” (Stringer-Hye 209)? Nafisi wants us to "imagine ourselves, we will not exist if you do not imagine us" (210) but she gives us such incomplete information about each woman that it is difficult to imagine any of them as a real person. There are fragments of reality, such as the conversation between Nafisi and Nassrin in his office when Nassrin is ready to leave the country (321). During that passage, the reader sees an actual dialogue between two people, which has a consistent beginning, middle, and end, unlike most of the book club-type conversations in Nafisi's lectures, in whichthe action switches back and forth between students' conversation and parallels with the literature they are reading. This trope may be entirely stylistic, but it bears a resemblance to the type of synecdoche used in travel writers' stories. This is no different than Tacitus, who has his experience with some Germanic men and women having enough experience to make generalizations about their "chastity" and "nobility" (Shaffer 47) without knowing any statistics or having any evidence of it as a truly characteristic general of those tribes. From Nafisi, we have these fragments of Iranian women's experience – Sanaz's unhappy love story, Azin's nail polish, Nassrin's lies to her father – but we don't have the fullness of their experiences, or stories. It is true that we hear about their incarcerations and their difficulties with husbands, brothers, and parents, but because we are not given a complete picture of any woman, we are left with an incomplete picture that we, as American readers uneducated about Iran, should consider carefully. There are no complete stories here; not even Azar Nafisi tells us the whole story of his life, so we are left with details such as pastries and coffee and the strange habits of Nafisi's "magician", of whom we know nothing else that he was a former professor and writer who under the Islamic regime withdrawn from the world. In Nafisi's defense, there are two reasons for the fragmented nature of the narrative; one political, the other formal. In the "Author's Note" (ix) Nafisi explains that the events of this story have "been changed primarily to protect individuals" and that "The facts of this story are true to the extent that every memory is truthful." There is good reason not to tell the full story of these young women, as they could easily be discovered and prosecuted under the current regime. The other is that Nafisi titled it "A Memoir in Books". This is not an autobiography, a multi-biography, or even a personal story or a partial life story. A memoir, a form that is often about people the writer has known more than himself, is not meant to tell life stories or perform comprehensive character studies of human beings. And Nafisi adheres to this form, with the exception that we find out more about his life than that of any of his students. The goal, as the title informs us, is to weave an intertext through the main books studied by the group of women and their lives, and in this Nafisi largely succeeds. However, the resemblance to travel memories is surprisingly real and a little disturbing. . Nafisi, even though she explains that these women became part of her family life (especially Nassrin), still gives us the impression that she was "just visiting" these women. We hear stories of domestic abuse, difficulties in love and tensions in friendships, but we are not really interested in any of these women because they are "ciphers" - nothing more than names with attributes associated with them. As JB Scott said on his trip to France and Italy "The women of Leghorn are singularly beautiful in general...They wear a kind of white veil hanging from the top of their heads...Their earrings are generally of immense size." (Bassnett 93) While we certainly get more detail from the students' lives than Scott gives us of northern Italian women in the early nineteenth century, the effect is the same. At the end of the book the reader does not feel empathy with these women, because they are drawn too lightly and are too much a collection of anecdotes and details rather than a story to be considered characters. What effect does this have on the reader's perception? of these women? If we briefly consider a transactional response to the text on the part of the reader, we could say that itThe stimulus for empathy with the characters is shared suffering or commitment, or some experience with which the reader is able to identify. Certainly these women leave us with no shortage of suffering or difficult experiences, but they are told so lightly, and so quickly swept aside in favor of literary criticism or Nafisi's own reflections, that it is very difficult to read them in "aesthetic mode", [when] we experience a personal relationship with the text that focuses our attention on the emotional subtleties of its language and encourages us to make judgments." (Tyson 173). For example, when Nafisi recounts the emotional discussion she had with Nassrin the young woman is about to leave the country, Nassrin alludes to the "disease" he contracted in prison, but Nafisi doesn't even ask her what the disease is (322) is a case in which perhaps his detachment as a professor came into play, or perhaps the desire not to intrude on Nassrin's life, but if this is how this conversation really happened, then the truth is not that service the aesthetics of this book. A much more effective dramatic device would have been to give the illness a name of Nassrin, or give us an explanation of why we are not told, but the truth of the episode or the detachment of the narrator. prevent it, and the pathos of the moment is subverted. Of course, this is non-fiction, and perhaps dramatic intensity was of little or no interest to Nafisi, but it also serves to detach the reader from the emotions and events that happen in the narrative. What is the consequence when the reader is detached? It becomes easier to make assumptions and read it as a light gloss of a life in Iran rather than a true memoir, in or out of books. This detachment makes it easy to dismiss characters and make generalizations about Iran and its people. Here there is less identification with individuals than with a collection of victims and the wrongs suffered. Furthermore, Nafisi's teaching of Western classics such as Daisy Miller, The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice smacks uncomfortably of "Westernizing" a culture in the traveler's view. mind, or “create” that culture in your image as you travel through it. As Bassnett reminds us, Mr. Scott was delighted to discover that the people of Northern Italy hated the French as much as he did. Isn't it the discovery that these young Iranian women, despite coming from a culture very far from the one that produced these books, appreciate, like us, novels like The American and Lolita? There is one commonality that might appeal to readers in the United States, seeing their favorites explored and extolled by women from a culture that, considering the history between the two nations, is both threatening and frightening to the United States . As Ramazani explains "...a reader unfamiliar with Persian literature will reach the last page of this book without any suspicion that there are many contemporary works written by Iranian women, reading of which could have been as subversive an act as reading Nabokov." (278) “Nafisi therefore seems to make the reading of Western literature [sic] the necessary requirement for the redemption and liberation of the mind.” Ramazani goes on to comment that Edward Said, (with whom Nafisi disagrees in the memoir) "argues that the nineteenth-century novel unwittingly but systematically contributed to gaining consent for British imperialist policies of which Iran had had more of his side - a fact that was, in part, responsible for the virulent anti-Western policies of the Iranian revolutionaries (279) To consider that Nafisi taught some of the novels that perhaps helped contribute to his and his students' oppression is truly ironic, and makes the reader wonder about, 2006.