[lit-ideas] Re: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" - "Why one should bother to re...

  • From: JulieReneB@xxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 22:54:31 EDT

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


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