Christopher Lydon Interviews…

     Please listen in at Minnesota Public Radio http://minnesotapublicradio.org and call-in at 1-800-242-2828.

     We’re on the radio Friday morning (March 5) at 9 a.m. EST with Azar Nafisi.  She has written the ultimate book-group story of the discoveries that come with deep reading–the connections made obscurely with values of freedom, curiosity, insubordination; issues of eros, independence, Islam.  American readers in astonishing numbers have been eating up the lesson.

     You wouldn’t have bet on Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran” to be the New York Times #1 bestseller—but there it is on the paperback list, after most of a year atop the hard-covers. 

     It has drawn a classic modern picture of the immeasurable value of high art and literature: it’s the picture of seven young Iranian women, shedding their veils in an apartment in Tehran through the worst of the puritanical Islamic revolutionary cruelty to women after the worst shelling of the Iran-Iraq war–and talking instead about banned Western books: the novels of Nabokov, Henry James, Jane Austen, Conrad, the Brontes. 

     “Reading Lolita in Tehran” is about a lot of things we care about: Islam… The polarities of East and West… 

     It’s about: women in fiction, like Daisy Miller and Lolita… And women under oppression as under the Mullahs’ regime in Iran today. 

     It’s about: books that stir up trouble, and books that get you through a crisis, or through the night…

     It’s about Henry James’ rule: “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… And I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of its process…”

     It is a book about our Internet world, too.  The Iranian bloggers, the connectivity of cultures, the shrinking world of politics.