Graceful, discerning literary essays.
Essays on how the work of Vladimir Nabokov evoked the feelings of alienation and loss that many experienced in post-revolutionary Iran.
When a “violent ideological totalitarian revolution” proclaimed itself as the Islamic Republic of Iran, Nafisi (The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books, 2014, etc.) felt “in a perpetual state of exile” from her beloved homeland. As a teacher and critic, she found in Nabokov a clear articulation of those feelings. “For him,” she writes, “exile was not just a physical migration,” but “a feeling of unreality, orphanhood, isolation.” Her close readings, along with critical and biographical studies, inform seven empathetic, incisive essays that together provide a sweeping overview of Nabokov’s major works. Translated by Khonji and revised for this publication in English, the essays predate, and contextualize, Nafisi’s acclaimed memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). Nabokov, more than other authors she was reading and teaching, spoke to the “deep traumatic and anguished existence” that pervaded life under a repressive dictatorship. He was acutely sensitive “to bad literature, autocratic regimes, and racial, ethnic, or religious prejudice.” In his two overtly “political novels,” Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, he represents totalitarianism as a mindset that believes it alone holds “a monopoly on reality” to which all must defer, and in which all artistic creativity and expressions of individuality are considered subversive and dangerous. In confronting this tension between politics and art, Nabokov, rather than depict totalitarianism’s destructive and “horrific reality,” explored how “creative minds” perceive and “resist its onslaught.” Among other works Nafisi examines are the parody Pnin, in which the main character “can be considered a literary descendent of Quixote”; Pale Fire; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; and Ada (the first of Nabokov’s novels that she read), which influenced her profoundly. The novel, she writes, “did not merely portray quotidian realities—it articulated the reader’s subjective realities.” In a sensitive, cleareyed reading of Lolita, Nafisi sees the novel as more than a portrayal of obsession or parody of love but an inquiry into questions of individuality, personal liberty, and loss.
Graceful, discerning literary essays.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-15883-0
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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