E-Mail This Article to a Friend Reading in the shadow of tyranny Azar Nafisi found the success of her acclaimed 2003 memoir surprising, but the reasons for its success shocked her even more BY TAMARA WIEDER

EVEN NOW, Azar Nafisi has trouble believing it. "This book will never get anywhere," she told her publisher of her 2003 memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (Random House). And yet, a little over a year later, Nafisi’s story of clandestinely teaching forbidden works of Western literature to a group of seven women in her native Iran is a New York Times bestseller and a critical success.

In the book, Nafisi recalls her Tehran living room as a refuge from the restrictions placed on women by the radical Islamic government — a "self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below." Now living in Washington, DC, Nafisi is free to live and teach as she chooses — and she continues to teach the Western classics she’s always loved.

Q: How has your life changed since the publication of the book?

A: It’s really difficult to pinpoint it. The most important level for me is that I have been encouraged in terms of what I would call my passion, which is literature, because I have been able to connect to so many people. And before that, this sort of connection was much more limited, and I did not have a good assessment of how much these works that meant so much to me would mean to others. The other part of it is that my life right now seems to be revolving around this book. It’s like having a new baby in the house: I keep running after it. So I have to rearrange my life, and that is the other change.

Q: Did you ever expect the book to be so successful?

A: I didn’t, partly because I’m very pessimistic about any form of success, usually. And I usually try not to even think about it. But when I did think about it, I would drive my editor crazy, saying, "This book will never get anywhere. Nobody will want to talk about Gatsby at this point in life." It was very unexpected, to tell you the truth. It still feels sort of not true.

Q: To what do you attribute its success?

A: Part of it, which I guess at least to marketing people would have been more obvious, was the fact that people are very curious about the part of the world I’m writing about. I think the surprising aspect of it was not that people are curious, because a lot of books do come out about the region, but that people were saying things like, they didn’t know that they had so much in common. I think it was what I usually call the shock of recognition. That you read because you’re curious, and you celebrate differences, but you’re always surprised by how universal certain things are. And I think that that aspect of it made people read the book. And the other aspect which has been amazing, and I’m so thankful for it, was really just the books. I mean, I discovered all sorts of people who would write or come in meetings and tell me, "We’re re-reading Lolita," or talking about Austen, and then also they themselves are beginning to talk about the books that they loved. So that part of it was really the unexpected part, that in these days, when we all are complaining about how people don’t read — and apparently people read less; I don’t know — that people are genuinely interested in books and in literature.

Q: What motivated you to write the book in the first place?

A: Well, you know, I’d become obsessed. That is how I write. Part of this was because when I was writing my other book on Nabokov — and I was writing that in Iran; it was published in ’94 — I started writing the book on Nabokov as a sort of literary-criticism type of a book. But I kept wanting to talk about the different stages in my life when I read Nabokov, and how each stage made me look at him differently, and how each stage he affected me or influenced my life. And I couldn’t do that in Iran; I couldn’t write about the fact that the first book I read by Nabokov was given to me by my boyfriend when I was very young, and I was very much in love. So all through the writing of that book, I kept thinking about this strange relationship between fiction and reality, and how each of them constantly gives insight into the other. So the seeds of it were sort of born out of my other book. And I guess that these are the two obsessions of my life, at the time — living in Iran and fiction. So when I got the chance, as soon as I came to the US, I started talking about these things all the time, and writing. I was lucky that my editor discovered me at one of these talks.

Q: What did you want readers to take away from the book?

A: God, you know, it’s very difficult for me to say, because as a writer, you like to be surprised by your readers. Sometimes they add things that you hadn’t thought about, but they’re unconsciously there. The only thing that I hope from the readers would be an appreciation of imagination. And I also hope they will become more curious about the kind of reality I’m talking about. I think that real knowledge comes out of genuinely being curious about other people, and not wanting to only read about things that you already know or things that reassert you. So these are the two things I hope my readers will take away, or give back to the book: that curiosity and that empathy.

Q: I was reading a recent New York Times interview with you, and you said, "One thing I can’t live with, which I would criticize, is to be in competition with my book." What did you mean by that?

A: This is an age where sometimes we pay more attention to people as personalities, rather than people in terms of what they do. Especially for a writer; maybe even in the case of a movie star or an entertainer — even in those cases I think that they would prefer to be known more by the work that they do, rather than who they are. Now, if you become too sensational or too much in the public eye as a personality and not as a writer, people maybe read your book because they know you, or they see you, or they think you’re an intriguing person, rather than pay attention to the work that you do. And I sometimes worry that that might happen to me, or I’m giving in to it without realizing. It’s very difficult to separate yourself from your book. I’d rather my book or what I write be the center of the attraction, rather than me.