Azar Nafisi reminds us that great books can transcend prejudice

Acclaimed international bestselling writer Azar Nafisi (“Reading Lolita in Tehran,” “Things I’ve Been Silent About,” “The Republic of Imagination”) returns with another book that examines the transformative power of literature. This time, through five long letters, she vividly imagines conversations with her father Ahmad — mayor of Tehran from 1961 to 1963 — who died in 2004.

A way to continue the bond with his beloved Babajan (“dearest daddy” in Farsi), in “Reading Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times”, Nafisi engages in an emotionally intimate correspondence grounded in a careful reading of literature that struggles against tyranny ; seeking solace in stories, the talismans she has always considered her “portable home”.

The letters are framed by the “crucial and turbulent period” from the bloody November 2019 protests in Iran, his home country, to the summer 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd in America, his adopted country, and strung together with personal memories and concerns. including her father’s long-term imprisonment, the pandemic pregnancies of her daughter and stepdaughter, her husband’s cancer, the stress of confinement, and the joyous births of her grandchildren.

Nafisi’s resistance reading list begins with Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”, recalling the 1989 fatwa – a “deadly threat to freedom of expression” – which prompted death threats against his supporters, including Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Thirty years later, “the hostility of tyrants to imagination and ideas” remains topical since his Teheranian friend Shirin reminds him that the totalitarian regime “through violence, incompetence or corruption” will kill them all.

Yet the books offer a haven of peace, “know no limits or boundaries” and “create new desires and unexpected passions”.

As an antidote to frustration and despair, Nafisi turns to the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, whose two fictions “turn the absolutist mindset upside down”, thus defending the right of individuals to exercise “independence of mind and heart”. Their characters in “Their Eyes Were Looking at God” and “The Bluest Eye” boldly claim their own stories.

The third letter is addressed to the Israeli novelist David Grossman to help him “write against the silence of death”. For him, writing is a way of “fighting against the seriousness of mourning…a way of choosing life”. When depressing Zoom meetings intensify absence in real life, Nafisi finds solace in Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury’s belief that writing is “an act in which you write with your wounds in order to heal your wounds.”

Next, exploring the literature of testimony in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Nafisi observes that every recorded story, like that of the protagonist Offred, is an act of hope, as it involves a future reader. And there is the valuable lesson that in the “celebration of ordinary life” there is also “its subversive nature”.

In his last letter, Nafisi introduces James Baldwin to his father and recalls his father saying of a visit to America that he could not understand how “a country so devoted to freedom” could also be “so cruel and not free”. Thirty years after Baldwin’s death, his writing “never seemed more relevant”. In the present, George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police and protests erupt in rage across the country, reminding him of Baldwin’s wisdom that “it is certain in any case that ignorance, allied with power, is the fiercest enemy that justice can have”. ”

Writing these letters to his father allows Nafisi to distance himself from his reality – our shared pandemic reality – at a time when fascism is rising around us to once again threaten democracy. Reading remains a subversive activity. Great books, as Nafisi rightly claims, “reflect and transcend the author’s biases as well as their time and place.” Count this one among them.