The Secret of ‘Durable Pigments’
Azar Nafisi talks to Sarah O’Reilly
Your book has sold over a million copies worldwide, has been translated into 32 languages and spent an amazing 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Did you anticipate such success?
It is very difficult to determine why a book becomes popular. I certainly did not expect mine to be so. But I can draw some conclusions from my interaction with readers, and their responses to the book. I think its success is mainly due to two factors, the first being readers’ love of books. On one level Reading Lolita in Tehran is a celebration of both the act of reading as well as writing: I wanted to show how the two acts are connected. The enduring value of books is as much due to writers as it is to readers from different times, places and perspectives, who are constantly reinterpreting books and giving them new life. I would like to believe that is one reason for my book’s popularity. Linked to this idea is the fact that many readers, when learning about literature classes in Tehran through my book, discovered a new way of relating to a people who they felt they had very little in common with. This shared passion for literature provided a mutual space, connecting a young girl who had never left the Islamic Republic to, say, a woman in the United States or Italy who had never visited Iran. This common passion became a means of communication and empathy between seemingly different cultures and peoples.
A second reason for the unexpected popularity of Reading Lolita in Tehran is, I believe, the fact that it provided an alternative view of Iran to the dominant political one. The main characters in the book were not the political elite but ‘ordinary’ people who, through their creative resistance to repression, demonstrated that while their leaders can be very banal and predictable, they, on the other hand, are not so ordinary after all.
In general, the book hasn’t fared particularly well in our multimedia age. Why, in your opinion, should we read? Why is it important?
No experience can be simply replaced by another. New means of communication should complement and not eliminate the unique means we already have at our disposal; they should help broaden our horizons and sharpen our senses rather than diminish them. Reading a book has an important physical component to it that is both tactile and visual and cannot be recreated through the virtual reality of the Internet (for example) which minimizes the actuality and intimacy required by the act of reading books. Like the separate imaginative worlds they contain, books gain a character and specificity of their own through the ways each reader treats them. Because of this physicality they become an organic part of our actual world, both public and private. For me, a world without books is a world that is mutilated and orphaned beyond hope.
Reading is an exchange, a constant conversation between the reader, the text and the writer. It is a way of interpreting and connecting to the world. We read because of our urge to know, because we are curious about others and aspects of ourselves that we have little knowledge of. Through this curiosity we gain the empathy that defines us as human. While reading is a private and intimate act it also becomes a way of connecting and empathizing with those we have never seen; it makes it possible for us to belong to a community of invisible interlocutors who engage us in endless conversations, constantly providing us with new experiences.
One of the themes in Reading Lolita in Tehran is exile: your sense of being an Iranian exile in the US, but also of being alienated by your own country after the revolution. Where is home for you? And what meaning does the word hold for you – is it the place you were born, or does it refer to something less tangible?
I learnt very early in life how fragile what goes by the name of ‘home’ could be. Revolution and the war are only the extreme examples of that fragility. The place I was born in will, in one sense, always be my home, but the only way I can preserve it is through memory – and the best way to preserve that memory is through language and literature. I have learnt to rely only on what Nabokov has called the secret of ‘durable pigments’; that which can be preserved through the portable home we create out of our memories and imagination. In that portable home, none of us will define ourselves by our given identities: nationality, geography, race, religion, class or gender. This is the home I feel most at home in.
You’ve said that you’re interested in ‘how we retrieve through writing, through imagination, what we lose’. What did you lose in Iran?
I lost my parents, friends, students and the land that I had been born in. But I also discovered that because nothing endures, and because we are constantly betrayed by time, loss is at the heart of life. Real loss is when we forget; I agree with Tzvetan Todorov that, ‘Only total oblivion calls for total despair’. One reason we write is to resist and to protest the inevitable sense of loss and despair that comes with the realization of life’s transience.
Can you describe what effect taking the veil had on you?
Because the veil has become such a politically charged issue I would like to reaffirm that for me – as for many Iranians – the issue of the veil is not about whether it is good or bad. That belongs to the domain of free debate and discussion. I also believe we cannot argue against a person’s religious beliefs if they do not harm others. But in countries like Iran, the veil symbolizes the confiscation of religion and its use as an ideology to control the citizens. In Iran, the state took the veil and imposed it on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, in the same way that communist China or the Soviet Union imposed a uniformity of appearance upon their citizens. That is why so many women who had worn the veil before the revolution objected to the state using it for its political purposes; for them this protest was not against the veil. It was about the freedom of choice.
For me, the imposition became a symbol of the state’s attempt to redefine and reshape me in its own image, denying my individuality and personal integrity. In one sense, through confiscating religion, the state has taken away the rights of both those women who wore the veil because of their faith and those who did not wish to wear it. One of the worst results of such an attempt is that the victims become complicit in the crime committed against them: for traditional Muslim women, their veil became a political and not a religious sign. For those who did not believe in wearing the veil it meant accepting a lie, participating in a lie, becoming a lie.
In Iran, exposing your girls to ‘illicit’ literature, and creating a space in which to discuss it, put them in danger. Was this something that troubled you?
The kind of danger you mention was part of our daily life. When we were most ‘ourselves’ – acting the way that we wanted to, listening to music, having parties, watching the forbidden videos and films – we became dangerous, and therefore punishable. Our class was not political; its subversive nature was defined by our attempt to create an atmosphere in which we retrieved what we lacked in public, open spaces and open relations. It was an assertion that life had not stopped because the state had ordered it to. This existential resistance to the imposition of power is also one of the most potent ways of resisting tyranny. It is much easier for the state to arrest and destroy political groups, but how can it arrest and eliminate millions of citizens, those who resist through being who they are?
Your book reveals the dangers of using religion as ideology. When you look around the world today, particularly the Middle East, do you fear that this danger is only increasing?
I do see the dangers of the abuse of religion as ideology which has lead to the current politicization and polarization of private and civil spaces. But that does not mean that I am without hope. I agree with Hannah Arendt that even in the most repressive societies our hope rests with the endless potential of human beings to find creative and inventive ways of resistance. Iran is a good example of this: after 27 years of ideological rule and repression, the young Iranians, the children of the revolution and the old revolutionaries, the former ardent Islamists share the same passion for an open and secular society. They have realized that the only way to create such a society is not only through a change of the regime but a change of minds, and that democratic goals can only be realized through democratic means. I am hopeful because for the majority of people, the urge to resist repression is not merely political but existential.
After you were first sent away from Iran, aged 13, you say that it was ‘the point to which all my desires and dreams returned’. But in post-revolutionary Iran, where did your dreams and desires go? To another country, as Nassrin’s did? Or to somewhere interior?
I greatly appreciate my present life in a generous country that has provided me with the opportunity to express myself freely; we need that openness in order to fulfill and articulate our interior world. But that does not mean I have no criticism of this other world, or do not feel restless living in it. Freedom, like happiness, is never achieved; it is always pursued from one stage to another. For this reason my main source of nourishment and strength is that interior space.
Did you benefit from having an inspirational teacher when you were growing up?
My first teacher was my father. He told my brother and me stories from the moment we could understand them and rewarded us with books. My best childhood memories belong to the time he made up stories with me or told me stories. Another early influence was my husky-voiced, cigarette-smoking English teacher, Mrs Weaver, when I first came to England.
Have you visited any book groups yourself since Reading Lolita in Tehran’s publication?
Yes! I had no idea about the range and potential of book groups until I published this book. I learnt many things through my exchanges with them – including the fact that my class in Tehran was one! I believe we need to create subversive book groups everywhere, including the academy. The idea that groups of people put aside a portion of their time to simply enjoy books is a fantastic one that can be turned into a subversive activity against the reigning imaginative and intellectual dementia.
When you left Iran you moved to a society where literature is more marginal. Do you have any ideas as to why this is the case?
As Bellow reminds us, in repressive societies brutality and banality are obvious and tangible but in democratic societies what threatens us is ‘our sleeping consciousness’ and the ‘atrophy of feeling’. Within these societies imagination and thought, like freedom, can be taken too much for granted. It is easier to live in a hazy forgetfulness, where a form of tabloid intellectualism and reliance on sound bites replace the challenges of imagination. Thought and imagination demand from us that we take risks, to pose not just the world but ourselves as question marks. They become marginalized by the smugness that shuns thought and questioning, the polarization and politicization that represses debate and genuine political interaction, the commercialism and lazy mentality that chooses short cuts and ready-made solutions.
Can you describe your life now – what’s changed since you left Iran?
Now I feel more in control and, in a sense, more fulfilled. But our past never goes away; both the nightmares and the dreams have remained with me. Nor do I wish to forget them. Forgetting would mean negating experiences that – despite the pain and the anguish, or because of them – have been so central to the shaping of my life. What I value is the new freedom to express both the nightmares and the dreams, the space through which I can have conversations about them openly and without fear.
Are you still in touch with ‘your girls’?
I have been in touch with most of them. My book in fact has provided me with the opportunity to reconnect to my other students as well.
You seem drawn to write from a place where fiction and reality meet. Can you talk a little about why this is the case?
Well, perhaps the most obvious reason is the fact that literature is a meeting and a confrontation between imagination and reality, a manner of retrieving and rearranging reality. I am curious about how this relationship works. Fiction’s influence on reality is invisible and intangible but essential. How can fiction open the spaces that reality closes to us? How dangerous is it when we replace reality with fiction, when we impose our fictions upon reality? What does the inability to produce genuine works of fiction imply about our inability to cope with reality? These are some of the questions I constantly return to.
Read more about literary classics – old and new:
- Moby Redux by author Leviathan, Philip Hoare
- Mark Johnson’s Secret Weapon, Le Grand Meaulnes
- Netherland
- Has The Catcher in the Rye lost it’s importance?
- Press Books: Publisher of the Noughties
The basic device will cost $499 (just over £300) in the US and should be available across the world by July. But what will this new mystical device mean for publishing?
It’ll almost certainly offer us a central point of distribution for e-books – or iBooks as Jobs would have it – a one stop virtual bookshelf. With the absence of Random House, almost all major world trade publishers have struck a deal with Apple to sell their books in the new iTunes bookstore. Those that haven’t will surely be scrambling to do so as of today. This is how Apple would like us to see things: with them as the go-to store for e-books of every description, effectively a cicumlocution of all other e-readers.
But let’s not label it a Kindle-killer just yet. Some reviewers have lamented that the backlit screen doesn’t come close to emulating the e-ink of Amazon’s competitor product. That said, it does have a lot more to offer in terms of the general multimedia experience – a point in which the Kindle is sadly lacking. The new larger screen allows the iPad to present itself as perfect platform for video and games material a point on which Jobs was strangely silent in his speech.
Further, having another big beast alongside Amazon and Google cannot be a bad thing, a point Steve Jobs sought to underline when unveiling the product. 125 million people worldwide have one-click buying with Apple, and this sort of market – even if we reach only a small part of it – has to be a good thing for publishers. And with the competititve price point – relatively low for one of Apple’s new releases – Apple have sought to place themselves right at the centre of the e-reader market.
Only time will tell whether or not this represents the publishing industry’s ‘iPod moment’, but Jobs et al have given us the perfect platform from which to experiment in the future,and probably made software developers fantastically happy in the process.
Read more Digital Diary entries:
]]>Penguin kicked off the new year by offering loss-leading excerpts from the e-book version of Paul Hoffmann’s haunting novel The Left Hand of God – which plays out in a Mervyn Peake-esque imaginary world stuffed with absolutely terrifying characters. Perhaps because of the genre, this loss-leader concept seems to have served them well as a means of attracting new readers to the novel – with countless reviewers who claim to not normally buy Penguin books saying that they clicked through from the app. It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out with other texts.
Alongside this new foray into suck-in iBooks, Penguin also seem to have recognised the huge marketing potential of the iPhone. Their umbrella app – last updated in late Novemeber – seeks to update readers regularly on Penguin release and upcoming titles, therein building their fan base. Potential click-through is always in mind though, with a stylised shopping trolley on each page.
With genre-specific searching and the weekly Penguin podacst, readers are able to move throughout Penguin’s content. The app itself – with a free price point reflecting its status as a marketing platform – is largely concentrated on Penguin US at the moment, though it does have numerous reviews of books published in the UK.
While it remains to be seen whether publishers will be able to develop the sort of brand loyalty seen in other industries, these are intriguing new ways of engaging with readers.
Read more Digital Diary entries:
]]>What are books? We feel passionately drawn to them. We fall in love with them. But a book is usually nothing more than text on paper. Sometimes there are pictures, perhaps even a few maps. The constraints of book technology rule out anything more. Until now.]]>
What are books?
We feel passionately drawn to them. We fall in love with them. But a book is usually nothing more than text on paper. Sometimes there are pictures, perhaps even a few maps. The constraints of book technology rule out anything more.
Until now.
At Book Drum, we believe even the most wonderful books can be enhanced through selective use of the images, sounds, video and information available on the Web.
Isn’t Captain Corelli’s Mandolin all the more moving when you can listen to the music the Captain plays on his beloved Antonia? Aren’t John Harrison’s inventions more impressive when you can see the actual mechanisms described in Longitude? And don’t videos about the Taliban and kite fighting in Kabul add depth to a reading of The Kite Runner?
The idea of outsourcing the job of enhancement, wikipedia-style, to a willing community of avid book-lovers is certainly a novel one (geddit? groan). In fact, it’s sort of genius - putting the emphasis of providing additional material back on the book fans not only saves time and money, it increases the likelihood of choosing material the core community of book readers would like.
Book Drum is currently hosting a tournament “for writers and editors all over the English-speaking world to help us assemble a collection of Profiles that illustrate and illuminate great books.” Sound like fun? Click here to pick your favourite and find out how to enter.
Meanwhile stay tuned for announcements and exclusives from our own forays into the world of book enhancement.
Read more about digital publishing:
]]>At least one major publishing company will be acquired by a retailer. For instance (and this is NOT a prediction, just a for-instance), Amazon could acquire Random House or Apple could buy Simon & Schuster.
I don’t know whether this would be a good or bad thing for the industry as a whole, but Curtis certainly makes a convincing argument for how this could bring stability to the publisher in question.
Meanwhile, over on Brave New World, the involvement of Google is viewed as a major deciding factor in the future of publishing, regardless of the success of their book settlement.
A while back, we did our own survey of predictions by industry insiders for a feature entitled Publishing in 2025. To read what MD of Press Books, John Bond; Peter Collingridge, MD of Apt Studio and Enhanced Editions; and Scott Pack, Publisher of The Friday Project, as well as many others, think the future of publishing will look like, click on the links below.
Publishing in 2025
]]>With the runaway success of Lonely Planet’s digitized guides firmly in their sights - the LP’s language guides, despite offering only 600 words and not a great deal of interactivity, have repeatedly reached the top 20 paid travel apps ranking – Time Out have begun launching their range of city travel guides as apps.
The first app – initially only covering New York – has married mapping from Google with Time Out’s own extensive content, offering a constantly-updated guide to the city. The app manages to be both highly simplistic and very effective: using the iPhone’s GPS in combination with the myriad reviews and listings Time Out have to offer on a city’s cultural landscape.
Interestingly, the Time Outers have offered up their app for free – attempting to draw out a strong dividing line between themselves and Lonely Planet. For more discerning customers – read those with a thicker wallet – the app offers a ‘Critics Choice’ filter, whilst those looking to get more for their dollar can make use of the ‘Free and Cheap’ criterion. Other added features are the ability to send recommendations to friends and the fact that the app works even when you’re not connected.
Whilst the graphics aren’t great and Time Out are hardly going to blow the world away with their functionality, they have crossed one big hurdle: combining mapping data with creative content and have thus outdone LP on this front – time will tell who’ll be more successful.
]]>The keyword of Phone Book is “Analog on the Digital Technology”; it combines digital value of iPhone and analogue advantage of books.It's true, there are some things the book is better suited for. In our technological excitement, it seems that we sometimes forget that the book is perfect in many ways. If it were a riddle, it would seem nigh impossible to fit so much information in such a small space. That was before microchips, though. ]]>
The concept, dreamed up by Mobile Art Labs, Japan, is the perfect solution to the problem of the Iphone being too small for tiny child hands. But the real gem here is how technology is used to add value to books, and keep kids interested in them, rather than setting itself up in opposition to them.
As the website explains,
The keyword of Phone Book is “Analog on the Digital Technology”; it combines digital value of iPhone and analogue advantage of books.
It’s true, there are some things the book is better suited for. In our technological excitement, it seems that we sometimes forget that the book is perfect in many ways. If it were a riddle, it would seem nigh impossible to fit so much information in such a small space. That was before microchips, though.
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So much so, in fact, that its developer – the Duck Duck Moose Partnership – has released another two apps to sit alongside their runaway seller, an Old Macdonald app and Itsy Bitsy Spider version – the developer’s latest offering.
Hot off the back of an Apple Staff recommendation, the app has attracted rave reviews from the likes of the New York Times and U.S.A Today. A musical book, based on the perennially popular song, Duck Duck Moose’s ‘Wheels on the Bus’ creation manages to be both incredible fun and a valid educational tool at the same time. Alongside a recording facility, the book app allows playback in five different languages, squeezing more educational value in just for good measure. ‘Itsy Bitsy’, the latest installment, asserts to offer more interactivity and more educational value, with a fly acting as a tutor teaching children about nature and the environment.
Ultimately, the success of these apps has thrown the playing field wide open for developers and publishers alike, confirming a market which many had long thought existed: parents looking to use the iPhone as a means of entertaining/pacifiying their children, in much the same way as a childrens’ book long has.
]]>The set comprises one free app and four paid offerings (‘The W Files’; ‘Parts and Labour’; ‘Big in Japan’; and ‘Where there’s Muck there’s Brass,’ respectively), all launched to celebrate the 20th birthday of the plasticine pair.
The free comic – transparently named ‘The W Files’, sees everyone’s favourite crackpot inventor and his canine friend come up against a group of alien interlopers. Public spirited as ever – the pair set off in search of the aliens, kitted out with Wallace’s various bizzare contraptions, only to be mistaken for aliens themselves and interviewed by the military staff of ‘Unitwit’.
The comic comes complete with all the accoutrements one might expect: thinly veiled parodic episodes, brilliantly understated lines and slapstick humour. The app’s creators have taken advantage of the new promotional pricing function of the App Store with ‘The W-Files’- making it available free for a limited time. The others – which offer variously a glimpse into Wallace’s mad world of inventions, a trip to Japan and a misguided attempt by Wallace to bring brass music back to the local community – are available at the lowest priced tier of £0.59.
Developed by Titan Publishing, the apps are amongst the first in a long line of comic book and graphic novel releases – a frenzy that looks set to throw up more exciting creative content. Watch this space.
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With The Bookseller talking about an ‘explosion in the number of apps’ available for the iPhone, and Apple’s device starting to be taken seriously as a challenger to Amazon’s Kindle, a small German start-up has set the running with the cross-publisher project ‘Zehnseiten.’
Brought to the world from the depths of Bavaria, Zehnseiten (ten pages), have combined the iPhone platform with that most traditional mainstay of publishing publicity – the public reading, presenting authors reading the first ten pages of their works, filmed in black and white and with only a glass of water for company.
The app’s brilliantly user-friendly layout and simple biographies mean that they largely succeed in their aim of giving both author and book centrality, ‘in a measured fashion.’ The aim, presumably, it to whet the reading public’s appetite for these new works – spurring them on to buy the whole physical product in response. The paradoxical result is that the audio-visual mastery of the iPhone brings the words on the page back to centre stage.
Impressively, the app’s developers have managed to secure the involvement of a cross-section of publishers, from big names such as Suhrkamp – Herman Hesse’s publisher and the publishing house that brought T.S.Eliot to German speakers, to the old East German publisher Aufbau which in its heyday published greats such as Christa Wolf – to smaller niche publishers, such as the Swiss imprint Sanssoucci. It’s range of authors is also extensive, covering the evocative migrant literature of Rafik Schami to the satirical non-fiction of Christoph Süβ.
Though the future looks bright for Zehnseiten, the app does have its draw backs – constructed entirely with flash, you can’t link to specific extracts; access too, can be painfully slow. And, conspicuously lacking an English-language section, it’s difficult to see the app’s plucky developers making waves outsides of German speaking Europe. But with their unusual combination of the multimedia functions of the iPhone app with the monochrome of the traditional public reading, Zehnseiten have kicked the app race off with something quite special.
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