abecedarian
Well-Known Member
After Reading Lolita in Tehran, Things I've been Silent About was something of a letdown. Not a terrible book, just not special. This time Nafisi focuses more on her family life and the troubled relationships between her parents, and Nafisi and her mother.Her father was jailed under the regime of the former Shah, while her mother was a member of Parliament, so she spends a great deal of time discussing political events of the 1980s. She does talk about books and reading though, and I found a passage I liked:
" We discussed the tyranny of bad writers who impose their own voices on their characters, taking away their right to exist. Why is it that in novels with a message, the villains are so reduced that it is as if they come to us with a sign on their forehead saying, "Beware, I am a monster? Doesn't the Koran state that Satan is a seducer, a tempter with an insidious smile?"

" We discussed the tyranny of bad writers who impose their own voices on their characters, taking away their right to exist. Why is it that in novels with a message, the villains are so reduced that it is as if they come to us with a sign on their forehead saying, "Beware, I am a monster? Doesn't the Koran state that Satan is a seducer, a tempter with an insidious smile?"
