A Life Well Read.

AuthorLueders, Bill
PositionRead Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times

In October 2016, both of the nations to which Azar Nafisi belonged were in critical condition

Her native land, Iran, was brutally suppressing widespread protests while her adopted country, the United States, was on the verge of electing a psychopath as President. So she decided to write a letter to her father, Ahmad Nafisi.

Azar s father, whom she calls Baba jan, had died twelve years earlier. The former mayor of Tehran, he spent four years in the 1960s in an Iranian detention center for "political reasons" before being exonerated on all charges. She poured her thoughts into that letter, and many more that followed. Read Dangerously continues the conversation Nafisi wants to have about "the subversive power of literature," as the book's subtitle states. It's a theme she also explored in her 2003 bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, which recounted her experience teaching a private literature class for young women in Iran, using a syllabus that included not just Nabokov's Lolita but also One Thousand and One Nights, The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice.

In Read Dangerously, Nafisi presents the letters she wrote to her deceased father from late-2019 to mid-2020. Here the reading shelf includes works by James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Bradbury, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

"You, Baba jan, would like this book," she writes about Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which led to afatwa being issued against the author. "It is not about comforting cliches, but ideas that question and disturb and attempt to change the world--which makes not only writing but also reading it so dangerous."

Literature, in Nafisi's world, is inherently subversive. "What choice does the king have but to kick the poets and storytellers out of his republic?" she asks at one point. "And what choice does the poet have but to destabilize the philosopher king's power by speaking the truth?"

Nafisi compares the rise of Donald Trump to that of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran: Trump "understood how to captivate the media, and to use their obsession with him to his advantage." Khomeini "similarly mesmerized people with his talk of God and spirituality." She also reflects on "what Trump shares with the leaders of...

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