8 lb gorilla/Reading Lolita in Tehran

[January 28th, 2004] 8 lb gorilla

In the past 10 to 15 years, books, television and movies seem to have caught on to the female obsession with the trauma, disbelief and inevitable joy surrounding the dreaded "unplanned" pregnancy. In many ways, it has become a genre all on its own. The typical plot goes like this: The carefree twentysomething goes about her life like an unstoppable force, concerned only by fashion, clubbing, career moves and, of course, the opposite sex. And just like that, the EPT test shatters dreams of fortune, fame, the nuclear family and perky breasts. While these regurgitated baby stories starring the expectant anti-mother are bit cliché, they never seem to totally lose their charm--or if nothing else, their audience.

Marissa Madrigal's 8 Lb Gorilla is a sweet tale told from the perspective of a party girl/edgy scenester gone fairly straitlaced, nontraditional mother. Written in that Sex and the City/Bridget Jones's Diary sort-of-inside-joke (only the women will understand) voice, Madrigal explains the usual tribulations that go hand in hand with childbearing. While the story doesn't necessarily hit upon anything that hasn't been knocked around before, it's an easy and amusing read and will undoubtedly appeal to those who can relate to the experience. Alex Valdivieso

reading lolita in tehran: a memoir in books

Azar Nafisi taught that literature--in particular, fiction--mattered. Literature mattered so much to her, in fact, that after she was pressured to leave her academic post in Tehran for her refusal to wear a veil or teach from censor-approved texts, she used her beloved novels to stage an intimate counter-revolution of her own.

Beginning in 1995, every Thursday morning, Nafisi invited seven young women to her house in Tehran to talk about the work of Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James and Austen. Conversations about banned books are incendiary acts under fundamentalist Islamic rule in a republic where women are threatened with jail sentences--even execution--for crimes such as talking to men who were not their husbands, or for letting too many strands of hair slip out from under their chadors.

Nafisi's account, Reading Lolita in Tehran, begins with plodding, literary-critic earnestness but soon blossoms into the best kind of memoir in its graceful braiding of the personal and political. Nafisi creates memorable sketches of her students as they shed their veils in her literary safe house, while crafting a portrait of herself as a complicated, conflicted narrator who is given to intellectual quandaries, seeks solace in bowls of coffee-flavored ice cream, and pays for her daily feminist bravado with recurring nightmares. "Living in the Islamic republic is like having sex with a man you loathe," she memorably tells her husband.

For too long, she writes, women in her country have been making their minds blank, pretending and dreaming of being elsewhere. At heart, her book succeeds as an intellectual fairy tale that challenges a reader's idea of how to stage a revolution. Ellen Fagg