Reading Lolita in Tehran

I probably made a big mistake selecting Reading Lolita in Tehran for my Justice in Literature class. It's a hard read for criminal justice majors who seem loathe to read anything other than job-wanted ads. (I've had at least three students miss two or more times of class because they were going out of state for job interviews.) However, I am myself happy to have read this book. It's powerful and moving and informative, and it certainly had me looking at Nabokov's work differently. I confess to always having felt nothing but contempt for Lolita and its child-abuse implications and assumed that the author was putting down on paper his fondest wet dream. Maybe I should read the work in a different way, as Azar Nafisi suggests.

There were a couple of things about the book that irritated me, though, and I can see those elements causing trouble for my students. The most important is the lack of chronological order. It was difficult to know what was happening when. Did this event occur before that event? Had this happened yet when she was writing this chapter? A second irritation is her "magician." It seems to me that she is having a love affair with this guy, perhaps not consummated, but an affair of the heart, nonetheless. I'm not sure the magician guy adds that much to the story except as a sort of implicit admission of her attraction to the man. While I am complaining, I also felt that she reminded me of the ditzy blonde in a horror movie who always goes into the abandoned house when the audience is screaming, "Don't go in there!" She seems to go out of her way to get into trouble. It's rather surprising that she did not wind up in prison at some point.

Yet, despite all that, I would have loved to have had this woman as a literature professor. Her passion for the works would have been inspiring. She makes me miss Patricia Okker, my American Lit professor at Mizzou. Pat and a couple of my professors where I got my master's were powerfully moving and rewarding teachers of literature. Drs. Marshall and Adams were sisters. Dr. Marshall taught American Lit and Dr. Adams taught Shakespeare. From them I learned about a life of the mind that was nowhere present in my life growing up in mid-Louisiana.

It's raining, cold, and Monday again. No sunshine expected until Thursday.