Monday 12 June 2017

#13 A book written by a female author


Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi


This is the best-selling 'bibliomemoir' (a memoir in books) that was written by Azar Nafisi, who on every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, held a secret gathering of her most committed and brilliant female students (seven in total) to read and discuss forbidden Western classics including Lolita, Daisy Miller and The Great Gatsby. An all-female book club meeting may not seem very radical to most of us, but what makes it a revolutionary act is that under the Islamic fundamentalist state that existed in Tehran at the time, reading Western works of fiction, not wearing a veil, owning a satellite, appearing in public without a male relative (for women), wearing make-up(even applying nail polish), expressing strong emotions publicly – were all illegal and punishable by law. 

As the so called morality squad under the regime of Khomeini stages arbitrary raids, executes dissidents, imprisons rebels without notice, shuts down universities and bookshops, and at a time when the censor of the film board is blind( literally, the head of the censor board at the time was blind!) – it is amidst these distorted and unnerving reality that the girls with the guidance of Dr. Nafisi, their former professor, employ their readings and discussions to make sense of a world that otherwise they couldn’t come to terms with.

Writing against the tyranny of time and politics, in what I have come to identify in her writing – a very lyrical prose, she travels down memory lane as she reconstructs her life spent in Iran, but chooses to explain that through the novels she deeply connects to. It is through the writings of Nabokov, Henry James, Fitzgerald and Austen that we come to understand Tehran and her life and times there during the revolutionary and war-torn regime that effectively and meticulously strove to erase the liberal and culturally advanced past of Iran.

The memoir has four sections each named for one author/work in focus – Lolita, Gatsby, James and Austen. As she begins the first section we are in 1995, soon after she has resigned from her academic post and having begun her secret rendezvous with her select group of students. They are all keenly passionate about literature and have all been her students at some point or other in the past. It is not a group that would have gathered voluntarily if not for their ex-professor’s invitation. They all have different ideological standpoints and have even suffered imprisonments at the hand of the regime for revolutionary activities. You may come to ask why would they, who have probably seen the crumbling world of hopes and dreams around them, turn to fiction for sustenance? What could Nabokov’s Lolita or James’ Daisy Miller teach them that they cannot live without?

For each writer she discusses, their works seem to gather a significance attached to the state that Iran was in at the time. For instance as they discuss Nabokov’s writings (they do discuss other writings by him as well) we realize that Nabokov too was no stranger to totalitarian regimes, and he does understand what they seem to be going through. His works were a way of him telling the world to strive to keep their integrity in times of social and political turmoil.

“ The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes….the only way out is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality.”

Azar Nafisi brings in other colourful characters from her memories - eccentric professors, former colleagues, revolutionary student leaders, idealistic fellow Iranians etc. Through it all she emphatically asserts the epiphany of truth that are hallmarks of great literature. As she herself puts it in her next venture The Republic of Imagination, “If we need fiction today, it is not because we need to escape from reality; it is because we need to return to it with eyes that are refreshed..” She continuously, relentlessly and passionately upholds the case of fiction in face of surmounting odds that were once against her.

For instance, when she teaches Gatsby in one of her classes, a lot of Islamic fundamentalist male students react against the story by calling it an immoral tale of adulterous love and materialistic greed – the very thing that the decadent West were characteristically known for. So, Dr. Nafisi in a brilliant move, puts the book on trial – and thus in section two, we have a highly stimulating discussion between the Islamic State of Iran vs. The Great Gatsby (guess who wins?).

A lot of political happenings that force a lot of the professors and students to flee from Tehran ensue and gradually the University is itself shut down indefinitely. She also narrates her personal stories in between this, and helps us understand the depth of her belief in the power of fiction to help us understand each other.

Admittedly the whole book isn’t around the book discussions by Nafisi and her selected students.  And I felt Austen wasn’t discussed enough, hardly discussed in fact. But nevertheless, it did show the impact that reading these works of fiction had a transformative power on all their lives. What begins as a recollection of a few years spend in Iran, subverting the edicts of authority by holding a secret book club, ultimately comes to an end when Azar Nafisi, herself decides to move to the U.S. with her husband and children. Soon her students also leave, only a few stay behind in Iran.

What Azar Nafisi does in this captivating memoir is that she pays an ode to the undying spirit of the Iranian men and women who despite the tragedy that engulfed them, decided to look beyond their immediate realities to fully understand the timeless magic of fiction and words that helped them weave a protective garb for their imaginations instead.  

She continues to write and includes political happenings and social tensions in her analysis of her beloved fiction. In this article here she discusses the need of the what The Little Prince  can teach us in the heartless times we live in today. 

If we read fiction, or have enjoyed fiction at any time in our lives, I believe what Azar Nafisi has to say in her works will be something we had long held to be true in our hearts but never completely realized in words. But she has done exactly that.  



Tuesday 6 June 2017

#12 A book of short stories



The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter


Angela Carter is a master fabulist – a remarkable teller of tales. This, her second collection of ten gothic short-stories are spin-offs of traditional fairy tales like that of Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast and Puss in Boots. The many worlds she weaves are magical but they are also dark, gruesome, fatal.

Angela Carter has an intense visual imagination which makes for a sensual evocation of the supernatural habitations of her imagined beings. They are intensely supernatural – unbelievable – yet, intensely real.Carter's inspiration does lie in Gothic literature’s rich heritage, adapting themes and motifs from classic tales of terror and giving it a unique twist of her own.

The first tale, The Bloody Chamber is her version of the Bluebeard’s story – of a man who marries and then kills off his wives, leaving their bodies in a hidden room. However, his most recently married young wife opens the door of the forbidden room and finds his secret.

The story has typical Gothic settings with the dark, broodingly evil castle where the Marquis takes his young pianist wife being cut off from land whenever the tide comes in. A melancholy castle situated in the sea, it is “at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place.” Every detail is drenched with the atmosphere of impending doom. For instance, a stark image that will leave an imprint in one’s mind is the wedding gift he has given to his young bride:

“His wedding gift, clasped around my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.”

It portends the way in which she will be chosen to be killed by her husband after he finds out that she
Retrieving the key from the pool of blood - literally, a bloody chamber.
had disobeyed his one rule and opened the door that held his dark secret. After she sees the torture chamber which he has chosen to safely store the bodies of his previous three wives, she is shocked by what she realizes was a truth that she had come to understand long ago – he was sadistic, murderous and evil. Also, she realizes that she would be the fourth body in the chamber soon enough.
However, in a twist to the classic tale, as the Marquis readies to behead his latest bride, it is her widowed mother who comes riding across the low tide, toting a pistol of her deceased husband and fires the fatal shot that brings the end of the gruesome but gripping tale. Also, since our nameless narrator inherits her dead husband’s wealth, she lives happily ever after.

The next two tales are both a subversive take on the timeless classic Beauty and the Beast. While the first tale, The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,  stays quite true to the tale as we know it, it is the second one that will excite us with the idea of possibilities. In The Tiger’s Bride, it isn’t the beast that is transformed, but the girl. Her father loses her to the Beast in a game of cards and she is forced to live with him, but as she comes to finally accept him, it is her skin that sheds and reveals the fur underneath.

 “And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world….my earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.”

In the three stories based on Red Riding Hood we have the wolf, the grandmother and little red herself taking on different dimensions. It is not advisable to think of them as re-tellings of fairy tales, rather it seems like they are a tale in themselves, with a life of its own. But the fairy tale narrative gives it a familiar structure that keeps us spellbound.

For instance, in The Werewolf, a brutal and short tale, Little Red Riding Hood goes to meet her ailing grandmother, is met by a werewolf on her way, but being a child who knows how to use her father’s hunting knife, slashes off the wolf’s right paw. “The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf’s paw in the cloth…..and went on towards her grandmother’s house.”

Clearly it isn’t for the faint-hearted. Nor will you expect the ending as it happens.

But, my favourite story by far would be not based on any fairy tale but the decadent and deathly tale of Vampirella (as  it was first named for a radio play) -  The Lady of the House of Love. It is a Transylvanian vampire tale which tells the story of last of the descendants of Nosferatu, a flawless and beautiful vampire continues to live in her ancestral home with only a governess to look after her, whereas the entire village has been deserted for a long while.

“Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious ancestors.”

Though she has to drink blood in order to satisfy her hunger, she seems disgusted and tormented by it. She asks as she drags her rakish fingernails over the bars of the cage of her pet lark, “Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?” She reveals her contemplation on a possibility of a different way of life. Even as the story progresses, the readers devouring each word, we will probably not see the end coming.

Gender and power relationships & structures, fantasy and folklore are all explored in these series of tales that excavate, question and challenge the 'latent content' of traditional fairy tales. As Vampirella questions, can a bird learn a new song? -  Angela Carter both asks and answers that question for us.