Azar Nafisi studied literature at a college in America, returning to her native Iran shortly before the Islamic Revolution. Over the next decade and a half, she lived, raised a family, and taught under a regime hostile to her as a woman and academic. Now living in Washington, DC and teaching at Johns Hopkins University, she has recently published a memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, about her years as an English literature professor in Islamic Iran.

The characters in Nafisi’s novel are largely amalgamations of the women and men she knew; in an author’s note she states “The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful, but I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe.” This caveat is highly intriguing, but is soon thrown into confusion by a laundry list of character description. How are we to believe that Azin was blonde, outspoken, and had an abusive husband when we also know that she is not really named Azin and that she is composed of perhaps three of Nafisi’s actual students? Something that isn’t problematic is fiction is strange when we don’t know how much is real.

Complicating the issue of authenticity is the dichotomy that occurs due to the imposition of the veil. Nafisi’s students become different women when they enter her home and remove their coverings. Nafisi sets the institution of the veil in biographical context: her grandmother wore it out of religious conviction, and refused to leave her home for three months when earlier reforms under the Shah banned the veil. Nafisi herself was never comfortable with the veil, and offers astute commentary on the effects its presence had on Iranian women. The government mandated the veil in stages: first in the workplace, then in shops, and eventually in any public location. Nafisi gave up teaching at the university in order to avoid this and other restrictions upon her freedom; these restrictions eventually reached into even her private life. Though she was eventually hired to teach at another school, this time it was with her hair covered.

In her last two years in Iran, having again left professional teaching behind, Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to meet once a week, in private, to discuss Nabokov and Henry James, Fitzgerald and Austin. The love she feels for these seven women, and for many of her other students and friends, is evident from the first to the last page. It was evident on a recent episode of CSPAN’s BookNotes, as she discussed the fates of some of her unluckier students. Despite a stiff upper lip and a knowing smile, tears came to her eyes as she recounted one of the sadder moments of the book: two students met in prison and discussed the different books they had read in her classes. One was released, the other executed. Nafisi reports that guards would often rape women condemned to execution, a loophole around the religious clause that grants virgins a place in heaven. This was just one example of the ways in which religion and politics have combined to create inhumanity and repression.

In addition to recounting autobiographical incidents, Nafisi allots much of her time to literary criticism, either as direct analysis or couched in tales of the more astounding incidents in her classes. The book is divided into four parts, one each on Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. As a result, the narrative is not chronological, instead skipping from a class discussion to a book group meeting to a protest march to reading through the air raids of the Iran-Iraq war. While some of her observations serve to ruin the surprise for those who haven’t read every one of these classics, they are all witty and informative. I wouldn’t have minded finding myself one of Nafisi’s students.

Many movies that are based on real-life events, and even some wholly fictional ones, end with information about the fates of the characters after the end of the film. Reading Lolita in Tehran has a similar ending, as Nafisi tells the reader what has happened to her students and friends since the period that ends the narrative. What is striking is how many have left Iran. Scattered throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States, several of her students chose, like Nafisi, to break free of the confines of Iranian society. One, Nafisi mentions on BookNotes, even appeared at one of her book signings. Having grown to care about these women, just as they cared about Lolita, Jay Gatsby, and Elizabeth Bennet, it was reassuring to see that they had promising futures ahead of them.