I can't explain it or make it make rational or philosophical sense right now, but sometimes fiction is a more powerful conveyor of Truth than is fact. I said, I can't explain it. It just is. Julie ========Original Message======== Subj:[lit-ideas] Re: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" - "Why one should bother to read fiction at all" Date:4/26/2004 9:24:46 AM Central Daylight Time From:cmharris@xxxxxxxxxx To:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent on: At 10:32 PM 25/04/2004 -0400, Mohammad wrote: >I'm greatly enjoying reading "Reading Lolita in Tehran", and although I'm o= >nly one third of the way through the book, one question had been nagging me= >. At the top of page 94, it was spelt out for me: > >"That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomp= >lish, why one should bother to read fiction at all." > >So I ask you, with full understanding that the question exposes my ignoranc= >e and betrays the my lack of sophistication: Why bother read fiction? This is a very interesting question for me too, as I tend to read 'factual' books - and yet watch fictional films without thinking twice about that. I don't limit my tv to documentaries and the news either. Recently I went on a writing course intending to discover new ways to approach the problem of writing a family history and of managing the huge amounts of raw material I have acquired - but the course turned out to be more of a course in writing " creative non-fiction" which tries to straddle the two genres. The factual side of it turned into a paper hunt for verifiable details, following a predetermined chronology - but the fictional seemed to tap into a subconscious interpretation of the facts, and revealed to me when I read what I had written - not evident to me as i was writing - much clearer truths about the relationships between different people or the impact of the factual upon them. For example, the fact might be that I immigrated to Canada on such and such a day and travelled from Montreal to Ottawa - but the fictional account of persons on the bus and my thoughts as I made the journey are more revealing of what it is to experience being an immigrant. So having tried this exercise I am now looking at and enjoying fiction and giving it more credibility as a revealer of "truth" than I did before. It seems to me that much of what Nafisi writes is creative non-fiction - ie she writes conversations and descriptions of events which are based on her remembered knowledge of the events but not necessarily completely accurate facts. >I ask because the parts that I enjoyed most from the book were the factual = >ones, not the fictional books discussed. > >For example, it is tragic to learn what the story of "Lolita" really was - = >again, apologies for my ignorance, but I had always thought that Lolita was= > a story of a child seducing an older man. I'd never read the book. "Readin= >g Lolita in Tehran" explained to me that the story was of a pedophile murde= >ring a child's mother then imprisoning and abusing the child. It's rather s= >ad and moving and I feel guilty that I had not known what the story was abo= >ut. I hadn't read Nabokovs "Lolita " before either - read it in order to appreciate "Reading Lolita" - and to my surprise really enjoyed the book. Its much more than the story as you describe it Mohammad and well worth the read. I have also rushed through The Great Gatsby and will be interested to hear others comments on that section in due course. I would like to continue but am out of time Best Ceri ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html