In her hybrid critical memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi poses a knotty question regarding the spell of problematic books such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.
A novel of shockingly egregious thoughts and actions, in which a 12-year-old girl is sexually abused and exploited in other ways, Lolita nevertheless offered a compelling text for Nafisi and her female students, all victims of the oppressive Iranian regime in the 1980s.
