Halfway through the novel, Maxim says to the second Mrs. de Winter, “We’re not meant for happiness, you and I.” I suspect this quote would have resonated with Terry, especially in his last months.
Of all the people I’ve known who have died, Terry is the one whose memory fills me with the deepest regret. Did I need to screen those calls? Would it have killed me to answer and chat, even when I was tired or it was a little late? Couldn’t I have seen the desperation behind the blizzard of Facebook posts? I don’t kid myself that I could have saved Terry, but I do know I could have seen more of him.
Part of the reason I suspect that Terry’s service was so ill attended was that he had genuinely hurt a lot of people; his gossip went from being cute when we were younger to quite vicious later, and he caused a lot of trouble. Terry actively alienated his friends. But my sin? A disappearing act. I was there and then I wasn’t, too caught up in my own busy life.
Ultimately, the problem with all our electronic communication is that it is so ill equipped to convey tone. What I read at the time as comic irritation with the world was in retrospect genuine despair. And as for Terry’s nostalgia—embodied by the boarding-school fiction and the posts about his Australian boyhood—I fear that was more torture than pleasant ache. I fear that it was the kind of nostalgia that Mr. Tracy had taught us when we read about Odysseus and his desperate need to return to Ithaca: “pain for home.”
The friend who told me of Terry’s death later described visiting Terry in his last days. He had fallen after checking into the hospital and cracked his head on the floor so loudly that his doctor heard the sound from outside the room. Terry recovered from that, but suffered from nightmares and day terrors, even worse after the fall than before. He continued to refuse to eat and was increasingly jaundiced as his liver failed. The doctor had suggested to this friend that she bring pictures of Terry in happier times when she came to visit. Terry wouldn’t look at them; when she tried to pin them on the wall next to his bed, he cried out for her to take them down.
It was particularly painful for her to see Terry refuse food—food had been one of the joys of his life. He was a generous and talented cook; he would show up at Thanksgiving and cook the entire meal for her family, taking great pride each year in turning out a feast more delicious than the last. Terry loved to explain the science—the role of the bay leaf; how to get the turkey to roast just right. His own dinner parties were epic, course after course served from his improbably small galley kitchen: Singapore Chinese food from his youth, the hearty roasts he had grown to love in Australia, delicacies from Europe on which he had spent massive sums, and whatever was most fresh from the New York Greenmarket.
But in the end he only drank: straight vodka. And he was too sick at the very end to watch television or read. Or maybe he didn’t want to do either.
Books had nothing to do with Terry’s death. But I can’t help thinking that they didn’t help, either—that the books he loved most helped him romanticize his more cutting characteristics and filled him with longing for a time in his life that he desperately missed.
When I think of Terry, there’s nothing I can think of that I would have given him to read. I just wish I had been a better friend.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Choosing Your Life
I’LL SOMETIMES HEAR someone say of a book, “That book saved my life.”
Recently, I came across a story of how a book did literally save a life. Actually, there were several books involved, but one deserves more credit than the others: an Oxford University Press volume on John Wyclif by Stephen Edmund Lahey. The book, published in 2009, explores the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of fourteenth-century Britain in order to give context to the writings of John Wyclif (more often spelled Wycliffe), the philosopher-theologian whose theories were key to Henry VIII’s break from Catholicism and whose philosophy helped establish the Anglican church. It’s part of a series on great medieval thinkers.
The life this book saved belonged to a twenty-one-year-old Florida State University student named Jason Derfuss, who had the very bad luck to be at the university’s library when a mentally ill graduate of the school, with extreme paranoia, started shooting there. Derfuss would later tell an NBC News television network reporter, “There is no way I should be alive.” He said that he first heard a loud bang. “I knew it was a gunshot right away and slowly turned around to see the gunman running toward another student and shoot him two times.” Before it all was over, the gunman had shot at seven people, including Derfuss, and had injured three of them; one, a twenty-one-year-old student, is now paralyzed from the waist down. Hundreds of students had barricaded themselves in the library or fled in panic; eventually, the gunman was shot dead by police, after he refused to drop his gun. When Derfuss got home, he opened his knapsack. “I pulled out the books and saw that they were all ripped apart. I started examining them and my friend found a bullet in the back page.” The bullet had ripped through several books. The one that stopped it cold was the book about Wyclif.
Similarly, a book—or, rather, a book-length manuscript—saved Theodore Roosevelt’s life. While Roosevelt was on the campaign trail in October 1912, an assassin shot him twice, but the script for the speech, which was in his overcoat pocket, slowed the bullets. He also had a metal eyeglass case between the shooter and his chest, so that clearly helped, too. Roosevelt was on his way to give the speech when shot, and though he knew he was injured, he realized that the bullet hadn’t pierced his lung. So he decided to give the speech and wait until later for any medical treatment. He began by asking people to “be as quiet as possible.” Then he added, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.” He continued, “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”
People also are often speaking literally when they say that a particular health book saved their life. If you have ridiculously high cholesterol, a book that helps you lower your bad and bring up your good may well save your life. And I’m sure all sorts of practical books have helped save lives: seamanship books that teach lost sailors how to navigate by the stars; wilderness survival books that tell you which mushrooms to avoid and how to scare off a hungry bear; and medical encyclopedias that help you determine when you are being a hypochondriac and when you need to rush yourself to an emergency room.
And then there are lifesaving books like Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer who is a hero in the fight against mass incarceration, racial inequality, and the death penalty; throughout the book, Stevenson returns to the story of his work on one death penalty case to help him illustrate American injustice. And there are novels like The Confession by John Grisham, the story of an innocent football hero with just four days to go before his execution. It’s one of the most gripping thrillers I’ve ever read; it’s also a devastating indictment of the death penalty—not only of its inhumanity, but also of how unequally it is applied and carried out. If capital punishment is ever finally abolished in the United States, the lives saved may in part be thanks to books like these.
Usually, however, when people say that this book or that book saved their life, they mean it in a spiritual sense. The book that saves a life may be the book that helps a reader realize she’s not alone, or that gives her something to hope for, or that entertains her at a moment she desperately needs it, or reveals a path or paths she never knew existed.
I’ve heard from readers who grew up feeling as though no one else was like them in the world, or feeling that the world had no time or place for them—until a particular book spoke to them and showed them otherwise. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
by Stephen Chbosky, Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich—these, among countless others, are books that readers feel helped save their lives. They may speak particularly strongly to readers who identify with one of the characters, but any book can speak to anyone. And it doesn’t need to be memoir or traditional literary fiction or poetry; I’ve heard it said of books in every genre. Romance, science fiction, fantasy, narrative, graphic fiction, and nonfiction—all can save lives.
Has any book saved my life? I think it would be more accurate to say that books like James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room helped me choose my life. If it hadn’t been for the books I read, I would have wound up with a life very different from the one I now lead. Books saved the life I have.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi is a book about books changing lives, and it’s a book that has saved lives. Nafisi was a teacher in Tehran, Iran, before, during, and after the Iranian revolution and the war against Iraq that followed Iraq’s invasion of Iranian territory. The book begins with her describing a class she formed in 1995, after resigning her last teaching post in Iran. She invited seven of her students, all women, to come to her home to discuss literature every Thursday. As she describes it, “The theme of the class was the relationship between fiction and reality.” Nafisi and her students read classic Persian works (A Thousand and One Nights) and Western literature (Pride and Prejudice; Madame Bovary). Eventually they read books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charlotte Brontë, and William James. And they did indeed read Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Nafisi is a scholar who had recently published a book on Nabokov, so it was natural that they would read his books.
Nafisi does realize that Lolita might seem a strange book to teach young women in postrevolutionary Iran. She writes: “I have asked you to imagine us, to imagine us in the act of reading Lolita in Tehran: a novel about a man who, in order to possess and captivate a twelve-year-old girl, indirectly causes the death of her mother, Charlotte, and keeps her as his little entrapped mistress for two years. Are you bewildered? Why Lolita? Why Lolita in Tehran?”
Soon, we learn the answer.
Nafisi explains to her students that Lolita is a book that goes “against the grain of all totalitarian perspectives.” She talks with the young women about the powerful image of a “half-alive butterfly” in the novel and explores “the perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.” But she is pulled up short one day by a question from one of her students, Mitra.
“Reaching for a pastry, Mitra says that something has been bothering her for some time. Why is it that stories like Lolita and Madame Bovary—stories that are so sad, so tragic—make us happy? Is it not sinful to feel pleasure when reading about something so terrible? Would we feel this way if we were to read about it in the newspapers or if it happened to us? If we were to write about our lives here in the Islamic Republic of Iran, should we make our readers happy?”
After a night spent pondering this, Nafisi thinks she has the answer and can’t wait to share it with her students. She writes:
Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you that fairy tales abound with frightening witches who eat children and wicked stepmothers who poison their beautiful stepdaughters and weak fathers who leave their children behind in forests. But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it.
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter. This is why we love Madame Bovary and cry for Emma, why we greedily read Lolita as our heart breaks for its small, vulgar, poetic and defiant orphaned heroine.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is, in many ways, a sad book itself, one in which the hand of McFate touches everyone. Nafisi describes how she lost, early in her life, any sense of security: one minute she is the daughter of a well-known politician, Tehran’s youngest mayor, and going to school in Switzerland (albeit one she calls horrible); the next, she needs to return home, as her father is now jailed on trumped-up charges. For four years after that, the family was “told alternately that he was going to be killed or that he would be set free almost at once.” And she also describes a brilliant academic career derailed for years by the punishing social and intellectual restrictions that followed the Iranian revolution. Nafisi is a target as a scholar of Western literature (particularly suspect for having received some of her education in Europe and America) and, more generally, as a woman. She is told she must abide by the “new rules,” which include wearing a “head cover.” She won’t. So she loses her job. She writes in a letter to a friend that she has been made “irrelevant.”
We meet, throughout the book, extraordinary young women who are persecuted, jailed, tortured, denied education, forced to marry, hounded. At one point, Nafisi writes of a slender young woman named Sanaz, who shows up late for one of the Thursday morning sessions. She is distraught and close to tears. Finally, after she sits down, with tea and water beside her, and after one of her fellow students attempts to lighten the mood with a joke, the others learn what has happened:
Her story was familiar. A fortnight earlier, Sanaz and five of her girlfriends had gone for a two-day vacation by the Caspian Sea. On their first day, they had decided to visit her friend’s fiancé in an adjoining villa. Sanaz kept emphasizing that they were all properly dressed, with their scarves and long robes. They were all sitting outside, in the garden: six girls and one boy. There were no alcoholic beverages in the house, no undesirable tapes or CDs. She seemed to be suggesting that if there had been, they might have deserved the treatment they received at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards.
And then “they” came with their guns, the morality squads, surprising them by jumping over the low walls. They claimed to have received a report of illegal activities, and wanted to search the premises.
These young women were dressed appropriately, so they couldn’t be criticized for their clothing; instead, one of the guards sarcastically criticized them for looking at the guards “with their Western attitudes.” And even though the guards could find nothing amiss, the women were all taken to a special jail “for infractions in matters of morality.”
For two days, they were kept there—in a “small, dark room” with a drug addict and prostitutes. “Despite their repeated requests, they were denied the right to call their parents. Apart from brief excursions to the rest room at appointed times, they left the room twice—the first time to be led to a hospital, where they were given virginity tests by a woman gynecologist, who had her students observe the examinations. Not satisfied with her verdict, the guards took them to a private clinic for a second check.”
After a “summary trial,” the girls were “forced to sign a document confessing to sins they had not committed and subjected to twenty-five lashes.”
Because Sanaz was wearing a T-shirt under her robe, her jailers “jokingly suggested…she might not feel the pain, so they gave her more. For her, the physical pain had been more bearable than the indignity of the virginity tests and her self-loathing at having signed a forced confession.” The final insult was that her parents now agreed with her brother that his sister had far too much freedom and should not be going on trips without male supervision.
Nafisi writes that she “cannot leave Sanaz and her story alone” and that she remembers “this incident just as I remember so many others from my life in Iran.” They have, s
he writes, along with similar stories people have written or told to her after she left, become her own memories.
But just as those stories became her stories, so, too, did the stories she read and taught to the young women become their stories. Lolita and Madame Bovary became part of the lives of these young women, along with the Persian classics they read.
In the epilogue we learn what happened to some of the women. Several emigrated to Canada, America, and England. Three continued for some time to meet in Tehran, discussing Virginia Woolf and Milan Kundera and writing “about films, poetry and their own lives as women.”
At the time of her writing, very little had changed in Iran. And yet it’s clear that all of these young women’s lives had changed—from the books they read and the discussions they had. Whether the books they read saved their lives or not, you would have to ask those women.
“Since then, however, there has been change in Iran,” one scholar told me. “This is not because the regime is kinder and gentler, but because people—particularly women, the younger generation, and dedicated activists—constantly put pressure on the regime by contesting and transgressing their rules in public and private places.”
There have been two waves of reform movements since the period Nafisi discusses. “Yes, they have fizzled out, or have been crushed,” the scholar explained, “but they have had a significant impact on how people can live, read, and behave in private and public Iran today.”
I’ve frequently seen Reading Lolita in Tehran on lists of books that can change or save your life. It’s just one of those books. I recommend it to everyone I know, especially anyone who doubts that one teacher, one writer, one book can make a difference.