Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
by Azar Nafisi
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Book Summary Information
Author: Azar NafisiEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2008-12-30
ISBN: 1400063612
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Random House
Book Reviews of Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
Book Review: Nafisi has broken her silence -- and readers should rejoice
Summary: 5 Stars
Azar Nafisi, who will be best-known for the runaway success of her last book, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books has produced that marvel, a flawless, crisply-written and meaningful memoir that more than accomplishes her stated goal, that of telling the recounting "those fragile intersections -- the places where moments in an individual's private life and personality resonate with and reflect a larger, more universal story."
Nafisi is born into the Teheran of the 1940s and 50s, a world in which women such as her mother can receive an education and run for Parliament -- even as her father, a former mayor of Teheran, is imprisoned for unknown reasons and confined for years to a cell. But Nafisi, educated in Europe and the United States, where she joins the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s and becomes a vociferous opponent of the Shah's regime, returns to Iran after the revolution only to discovery the existence of a new kind of "black" totalitarianism -- clerical rule by Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors. It is against the backdrop of the dramatic events of these times -- coups, revolutions, civil war and war -- that Nafisi tells deeply personal stories of her life and those of her parents, two deeply incompatible people who damaged each other and, in their different ways, damaged their daughter.
From an early age, Nafisi learns to take refuge in stories and literature; first, the tales that her father tells her from Persian history and mythology (her favorite character is Ferdowsi's Radabeh, from the Shahnameh chronicles) and later books that range from Annemarie Selinko's historical romance, Desiree, to Tolstoy, George Eliot and -- of course -- Nabokov. Perhaps, she muses, her family relied too much on stories and writing. "Other families talked, we wrote: what we felt or hoped for, our complaints -- we wrote all this, as if we could not bear to look into one another's eyes and just talk."
Nafisi saw her home life with a mother with whom she argued bitterly and continually as a kind of prison; an early, unhappy first marriage, she records, was her bid for escape. Meanwhile, her father sought a different kind of escape in long-term romantic affairs with mistresses who for periods of time became part of the family circle. The turmoil that swirled around the family relationships was drama enough for most memoirs; in this case, it is accompanied by the backdrop of the turbulence of Iran itself, as Nafisi recalls seeing former friends and enemies (and relatives) end up executed by the Khomeini regime. She recounts her struggles to find purpose for herself without betraying her principles. Unusually for memoirs today, she is ruthlessly honest with her younger self and herself today, acknowledging her own frailties (as a result of childhood abuse by a Hajii Agha, a visiting cleric, she writes that she found it easier to confront the militia on the streets of Teheran than to sleep alone at night. Making the abuse itself more intolerable, she says now, was the fact that this behavior -- not uncommon -- "was that it was not talked about and acknowledged publicly. Airing the dirty laundry, this was called."
Nafisi is conscious that she is airing what her parents would have believed was their own dirty laundry, writing about their weaknesses as well as their heroic moments (such as her mother's support of her at critical junctures, including the night she feared she would miscarry her second child because of the Iraqi bombing of Teheran). Moreover, she notes, in Iranian society, "private lives are trivial and not worth writing about." Even her father's published memoir is a "cardboard version of himself" and his real life.
Readers can't help but be grateful to Nafisi for breaking her own silence, whether that was about reading Lolita in Teheran, watching the Marx Brothers in Teheran, or the ways in which her life took shape under the influence of the members of her extended family. The process of writing this memoir may not have produced the elusive 'closure' for Nafisi herself, but it did, she says, produce understanding: "a sense that this narrative might be the the only way through which we can acknowledge our parents and in some form bring them back to life, now that we are free, at last, to shape the boundaries of our own story."
That is a goal that transcends any cultural barriers. Similarly, while Nafisi's eloquent and thoughtful book is unquestionably a product of the author's specific background and experiences, it should appeal to any reader interested in this universal theme.
Summary of Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
I started making a list in my diary entitled ?Things I Have Been Silent About.? Under it I wrote: ?Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran.? I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close to me in ways I had never imagined.--From Things I Have Been Silent About
Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country?s political revolution. A girl?s pain over family secrets; a young woman?s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval?these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir, as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and ?reminds us of why we read in the first place? (Newsday).
Nafisi?s intelligent and complicated mother, disappointed in her dreams of leading an important and romantic life, created mesmerizing fictions about herself, her family, and her past. But her daughter soon learned that these narratives of triumph hid as much as they revealed. Nafisi?s father escaped into narratives of another kind, enchanting his children with the classic tales like the Shahnamah, the Persian Book of Kings. When her father started seeing other women, young Azar began to keep his secrets from her mother. Nafisi?s complicity in these childhood dramas ultimately led her to resist remaining silent about other personal, as well as political, cultural, and social, injustices.
Reaching back in time to reflect on other generations in the Nafisi family, Things I?ve Been Silent About is also a powerful historical portrait of a family that spans many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, which turned Azar Nafisi?s beloved Iran into a religious dictatorship. Writing of her mother?s historic term in Parliament, even while her father, once mayor of Tehran, was in jail, Nafisi explores the remarkable ?coffee hours? her mother presided over, where at first women came together to gossip, to tell fortunes, and to give silent acknowledgment of things never spoken about, and which then evolved into gatherings where men and women would meet to openly discuss the unfolding revolution.
Things I?ve Been Silent About is, finally, a deeply personal reflection on women?s choices, and on how Azar Nafisi found the inspiration for a different kind of life. This unforgettable portrait of a woman, a family, and a troubled homeland is a stunning book that readers will embrace, a new triumph from an author who is a modern master of the memoir.
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