Recent events in Iran have placed a fascinating country under more scrutiny than usual, and “Reading Lolita in Tehran” provides a bracing sense of what it has been like to live in this deeply repressive culture since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Azar Nafisi, an English literature professor who got her doctorate at the University of Oklahoma, returned to her native Tehran just after the tides of history swept away the shah and swept in the ayatollah. As captured in a dramatization of her bestselling 2003 memoir, she apparently thought life would continue somewhat the same as before. It didn’t.
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