/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}: “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books” by Azar Nafisi

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Friday, March 26, 2010

“Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books” by Azar Nafisi

“Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”

~ by Azar Nafisi

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“Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books” by Azar Nafisi recounts the prohibitive life of the women in her country, Iran, and tells their inspiring struggle towards intellectual freedom and their desire for independent thinking. In this book, Nafisi discusses in full and vivid details the hardships the Iranian women went through before, during and after the 1979 revolution as well as during Ayatollah Khomeini’s government. This kind of extremely conservative, backward and patriarchal society has stunted the intellectual growth and development of the women all over the world especially in conservative Muslim countries like Iran. Nafisi and all the women in the world had to contend with these obstacles in their desire to get quality education, achieve gender equality and improve their intellectual status as growth-seeking beings. Ever since the 1979 revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, Western Culture and Literature has become wholly reviled in Iran and especially forbidden for women to explore. However, that did not stop Azar Nafisi from gathering a small group of women to her home every Thursday to lead a discussion group on such banned Western classics as “Pride and Prejudice” and “Lolita”.

Every Thursday morning, for two years, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the bold and inspired teacher Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western Classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s
living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary ‘memoir’, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. “Reading Lolita in Tehran” is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of Literature.

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What is /Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"} ?

A Digital or Virtual LIBRARY comprising of Free "eBooks" ~ Articles ~ Discussions ~ Posts ~ Links ~ Photos ~ Videos about "AUTEUR" Films ~ FICTION ~ Poetry ~ Arts & Literature ~ Theatre ~ Philosophy ~ Psychology ~ Music ~ Science ~ Culture etc.

Library.Babel

Interests: Schizophrenia, Metaphysics, Existentialism, Autism... Andrzej Tarkovsky... Ingmar Bergman... Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera... M.D. Ramanathan, Kumar Gandharva... J.S. Bach, Wagner...

/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}

~ The {Title} is taken from Borges' {The Library at Babel} ~

Borges' "The Library at Babel" is a story that encompasses a world. The world that is a library, a library that is a universe broken into endless hexagons connected by stairs and hallways. It's unlike any library that has ever existed, a library of the mind, a virtual library, and as such the source of imaginative illustration. I've encountered pictures of its hexagonal galleries and infinite air shafts on Web Sites, and recently the story was re-published in hardcover with engravings by Erik Desmazieres, who gave the Library's interior a spooky look that I associate with the interiors of Ridley Scott's 1979 science-fiction. Many, of course, would choose to interpret the story in a more philosophical manner. Certainly a case can be made to see the story as a parable about man's search for God, or man's essential ignorance of the world, or of the chaos of the universe. While I acknowledge the story's visual and philosophical qualities, it has a personal connection. It evokes what I would call the large-library experience. Borges' nameless librarian, an administrator of some minor sort - if the library is infinite, all administrators are minor - recollects, "Like all men of the library, I have traveled in my youth, I have wandered in search of a book." Reading this, I think of my own rambles through stacks and shelves both as a student and an unattached "scholar." I've wandered through libraries looking for or just at books, feeling their collective weight, reading titles, puzzling at the cipher of numbers and letters by which they are classified. I have been lost in corridors of books like one drifting through the pinched streets of some foreign town, though indeed these rambles have taken part in and around my home. Books as realia have been part of this attraction. Strolling between shelves of bound volumes, I feel I'm pressed between the scales of some vast and dormant beast. Opened, each book presents a small bracket of hard space and distilled experience that, when joined in imagination with other books, create the sensation of time congealed. Books in vast quantities form a reality greater than the sum of their parts. Unlike museums, whether of science or art, that enfold me in a history of eras and schools and "movements," large libraries point beyond their realia. They go from the tangible to the intangible, from the temporal to the timeless, from the momentary to the eternal. Masses of books suggest the infinite. - Garrett Rowlan

/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"} is dedicated to:

My Eternal Lover & Mentor ~
"Jorge Luis Borges"

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The movement of atoms is eternal.

Thrown through the void,
either by their own weight
or by the impact of other atoms,
they wander
until chance brings them together.

Some of them manage to cling together;
they form the most solid bodies.

Others,
more mobile,
are separated by a greater distance;
they form the less dense bodies,
air and light.

Some did not wish to be admitted to any group;
they move around gloriously and endlessly in space,
like dust motes lit up by rays of light in a dark room.

[from Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, recited by Rousseau in La vallée close]

~ This seemingly simple poetry reminds us that every work of Art is relative to the Grand Time wherein it was sprout, and is to be judged thus. We won't/ might not hold a good opinion when we read and consider these lines now, after two decades of Stephen Hawking and 'A Brief History of Time'. This poem was written in First Century BC, by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. Now, do we ought to re-think and re-consider our opinion? Epicurean Physics, atomism, the nature of the mind and soul, explanations of sensation and thought, the development of the world and its phenomena, a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena, arguments about God, Lucretius' Physics - everything is here, in these simple lines of poetry ~

Concept & Design:
Library.Babel

/Library of Babel/ {in the process of "being built"}