(no subject)

This article pisses me off. It does so, because the interveiwee just really, really doesn't get *the point* of Reading Lolita in Tehran. He insists on veiwing the book as a political manifest (at one point becoming angry over the fact that Nafisi ridicules the protesters at the American embassy, without mentioning the CIA led coup in 1953, among other things), and gets annoyed at Nafisi for being pro-American and pro-Western. Somehow, it complete escapes his notice that what Nafisi is commenting upon, is not whether or not America is a thing of goodness, light and candy-canes, her point is the growing absurdity of the revolution. Whatever happened in 1953 is utterly irrelevant. Nafisi is not comparing America to Iran, she really isn't, she is commenting on the absurdity, the ridiculousness, the utter inhumanity of the revolution as she saw it. Which is oddly enough why it's called a memoir, and not, say, a political manifest.

And I am not denying that it has political issues, it could hardly avoid them, due to subject matter. But if it is anything, it is first and foremost a declaration of individuality, and the regime made that political, not Nafisi.

Then again, a man who protests the fact that she uses English/American literature as the basis for her book, is obviously in a completely different stratosphere than the point.