By Paul Carrier
Azar Nafisi, the best-selling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, focuses her roving eye and keen intellect on the United States in The Republic of Imagination, as she explores the importance fiction plays — or should play — in American life.
With mixed results.
Nafisi, who was born in Iran but became an American citizen in 2008, contends that literature gives readers a key to understanding the heart and soul of America and to expanding their own horizons, both as citizens and as travelers in the realm of the mind.
In the introduction to The Republic of Imagination, Nafisi explains that her latest book is an extended response to the comments of a young Iranian whom she once met at a bookstore in Seattle. The man said her interest in writing for an American audience was “useless” because Americans “don’t care about books and such things.”
“Stories are not mere flights of fantasy or instruments of political power and control,” Nafisi writes. “They link us to our past, provide us with critical insight into the present and enable us to envision our lives not just as they are but as they should be or might become.” The author says she cannot imagine living in a country that is indifferent to what she has dubbed the Republic of Imagination, which anyone can enter with “an open mind, a restless desire to know and an indefinable urge to escape the mundane.”
What follows is a mélange of memoir, biography, plot summaries and literary analysis in which Nafisi devotes much of her time to deep readings of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and works by James Baldwin, to lay bare what they tell us about the American psyche.
Nafisi became enthralled with American literature as a child growing up in Tehran, and it shows. She is thoughtful and insightful, skilled at finding links between, say, the adventures of Huck and Jim and the role of individualism in America, a land where the freedom to be yourself often is coupled with isolation and loneliness.
But Nafisi juggles so many balls that The Republic of Imagination can be startlingly disjointed. Much of what she has to say is sagacious, especially on such subjects as the poorly designed Common Core learning standards, misguided efforts to shield overly sensitive students from books that might disturb them, and the ominous dangers of ideology. Yet some of what she writes seems obvious, or bewildering.
One minute Nafisi is teasing lessons about contemporary America from a favorite novel. Then we are back in Iran, where Nafisi lived during the revolution that installed the Islamic state; or meeting friends from her student days at the University of Oklahoma; or reading her take on Oprah Winfrey.
We are with Nafisi as she becomes an American citizen in a “rather shabby room” on Dec. 1, 2008. And we hold our breath as Nafisi’s pregnant friend Farah, whose husband has been imprisoned (and is later killed) by the new regime, makes a harrowing escape from Iran to Turkey with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Neda in tow. Farah makes her way to the United States, where she and Nafisi passionately discuss literature, even as cancer slowly claims Farah’s life.
Some of this is compelling stuff, but is all of it germane? Or as well-focused and sharply analyzed as the better passages in The Republic of Imagination lead us to expect from the book as a whole? There is much flitting to and fro here, as well as an unevenness that is disconcerting.
Still, there's no denying Nafisi’s passion. In Pakistan, she writes, “a girl called Malala was willing to give her life to be able to learn to read and write. What would it take to rekindle that hunger here? That many of our children are illiterate when it comes to history and literature is a much-lamented fact known to all, but do they know what they are missing?"
