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The one reaction which surprised me the most was the male student's to The Great Gatsby. He simply saw it as emblematic of American decadence and the inevitable fall of the West. The notion that it might be a work critical of those same things doesn't even enter into his head. How about you, CW?

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The world of the novel is one of empty rituals. Every act is bereft of substance and significance, and even death becomes a spectacle for which the good citizens buy tickets. It is only through these empty rituals that brutality becomes possible. In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-headed child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality. Nabokov had a special Russian term for this: poshlust.

Poshlust, Nabokov explains, "is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive." Yes, there are many examples you can bring from everyday life, from the politician's sugary speeches to certain writer's proclamations to chickens. Chickens? You know, the ones the street vendors sell nowadays—if you lived in Tehran, you couldn't possibly miss them. The ones they dip in paint—shocking pink, brilliant red or turquoise—in order to make them more attractive. Or the plastic flowers, the bright pink-and-blue artificial gladiolas carted out at the university both for mourning and for celebrations.

What Nabokov creates for us in Invitation to a Beheading is not the physical pain and torture of a totalitarian regime but the nightmarish quality of living in an atmosphere of perpetual dread. [...]

Unlike in other utopian novels, the forces of evil here are not omnipotent: Nabokov shows us their frailty as well. They are ridiculous and they can be defeated, and this does not lessen the tragedy—the waste. [...]

Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and the absurdity of the cruelty to which we werre subjugated. We also had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive. We also instinctively recognized poshlust—not just inothers, but in ourselves. This is one reason that art and literature became so essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity. What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between your savior and your executioner.

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Originally posted by zmjezhd:
I guess that's it for Reading Lolita in Tehran. Is there another book on the reading list?