And maybe worst of all, it doesn't make me feel any more empathetic to the Iranian people than I already did and it doesn't give me any additional insight into Islamic culture that I haven't already gotten from Western media sources. But instead it's dry as hell and doesn't follow any cohesive pattern-it just feels like a lot of random moments in the life of Azar Nafisi strung together by some run-of-the-mill literary criticism. It has a good premise, a lot of potential, and it's about a topic I'm actually very interested in and would like to know more about. It makes me angry because I think this COULD really be a good book.
Overall, enough to interest me enough to seek out other books on a similar topic, but not enough to make me return to it. The style is lyrical, but empty and frustrating. Many of the people who feature are indistinguishable from one another, and some of them-Nafisi's husband, her children, her parents-are conspicuous by how little they are mentioned. On a more technical level, the structure of the work is confusing and disjointed. Especially in the case of Austen-how novel to point out that there is a satirical and sarcastic element to her work. Nafisi's analysis of the works of Nabokov, Austen, etc, was similarly shallow-it felt at times as if I were reading a poor collection of Cliff Notes.
Perhaps the story of these meetings-which were, undoubtedly, risky for all involved-would have had more impact if she had dug deeper into their meaning, their context, instead of settling for a relatively shallow assessment. For me, it was as if the author was making the same mistake as the Iranian ayatollahs: just as they confuse personal thoughts for political intent, so Nafisi seems to confuse the personal, therapeutic action of a private social event with something that automatically has major external political significance. But for such a promising concept, and for a book which deals with so many serious and complex topics, it's facile and cliched.
The premise of it sounded interesting to me-a glimpse at the lives of women and academics under the totalitarian regime in Iran, arranged around a series of bookclub meetings and analyses of various famous books. This book failed for me on a number of levels.
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