Azar Nafisi by Reading Lolita in Tehran Read Free Book Online Page B

Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel, the finished work, is hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life, ordinary everyday life, all the normal pleasures that Lolita, like Yassi, was deprived of.
    Warming up and suddenly inspired, I added that in fact Nabokov had taken revenge against our own solipsizers; he had taken revenge on the Ayatollah Khomeini, on Yassi’s last suitor, on the dough-faced teacher for that matter. They had tried to shape others according to their own dreams and desires, but Nabokov, through his portrayal of Humbert, had exposed all solipsists who take over other people’s lives. She, Yassi, had much potential; she could be whatever she wanted to be—a good wife or a teacher and poet. What mattered was for her to know what she wanted.
    I went on to tell her one of my favorite Nabokov stories, called “The Magician’s Room.” At first he had wanted to call it “The Underground Man.” It was about a gifted writer and critic whose two great loves had been fiction and film. After the revolution, all that he had loved was forbidden, driven underground. So he decided to stop writing, to stop making a living for as long as the Communists were in power. He seldom left his small apartment. At times he was near starvation, and if not for his devoted friends and students and a little money left him by his parents, he would have starved.
    I described his apartment in detail. It was bare and white—flagrantly white: the walls, the tiles, even the kitchen cabinets. The only decoration in the living room was a large painting on the otherwise empty wall facing the entrance. The painting was of trees, shades of thick textured green on green. There was no light, yet the trees were illuminated, as if reflecting a luminosity that came not from the sun but from within.
    The furniture in the magician’s living room consisted of one brown sofa, a small table and two matching chairs. A rocking chair seemed stranded in the space between the living and dining area. A small rug, the gift of an already forgotten lost love, was thrown in front of the rocking chair. In this room, on that sofa, the underground man received his carefully selected visitors. They were famous filmmakers, scriptwriters, painters, writers, critics, former students and friends. They all came to ask his advice about their films, books and lovers; they wanted to know how they could bypass the regulations, how they could cheat the censor or carry on their clandestine love affairs. He shaped their works and their lives for them. He spent hours talking through the structure of an idea or, in the cutting room, editing a film. He advised some friends on how to make up with their lovers. He advised others that if they wanted to write better, they should fall in love. He read almost all the publications in the Soviet Union and was somehow up-to-date on the latest or best films and books written abroad.
    Many wished to be part of his hidden kingdom, but he picked only a few who passed his secret test. He made all the bids, accepting and rejecting them for reasons of his own. In return for his help, he asked that his friends never acknowledge or mention his name publicly. There were many whom he had cut from his life because they had gone against this demand. I remember one of his oft-repeated sentences: “I want to be forgotten; I am not a member of this club.”
    The look on Yassi’s face encouraged me to shape and invent my story. She reminded me of what I must have looked like as a very small child when my father, at night and also in the early morning before he went to work, would sit by my bed and weave stories. When he was angry at something I had done, when he wanted me to do something, when he wished to appease me, all the mundane details of an everyday relationship he transformed into a tale that choked me with sudden thrills and tremors.
    What I did not tell Yassi that day was