[sveta]

Originally Posted by stingo

To start the ball rolling, why do you think Lolita was chosen as the first book discussed by Nafisi's group? What do you think of the choice? What would you have started with and why?

I don’t think there’s too much left to guess work here…You’ve got to pick a book that’s thought-provoking and evokes emotional response on a personal level. “The desperate truth of the confiscation of one individual’s life by another”, Lolita is the story the girls can relate to; they don’t know “what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her”; neither do they know what would have become of themselves, had they lived in a different world, but that’s what they’re trying to uncover.
Just like Lolita, they’re deprived of “pleasures of ordinary life” and lack their history, which became “immaterial” with the new regime. But it’s not just about the girls. Their personal sorrows and joys resonate with something indefinitely larger, as Nafisi applies Lolita’s “desperate truth” to the whole country; the country deprived of the past and “pinned to the wall”; the country fixed in a still life mode, surrendered to what sounds like dystopia…
Am I digging too deep here? Somebody stop me!