Azar Nafisi

UNVEILED
With Afghanistan, it was about Osama. With Iraq, Saddam and his WMDs. With Iran, the veil? I wonder what Dubya has in mind for the Islamic Republic, so it's a good time to hear from Azar Nafisi, whose memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (Random House, $23.95), describes 18 years of living under that strict theocracy. A Western- educated academic (now at Johns Hopkins), she returned to Iran in 1979 full of idealism about teaching in a regime freed from the Shah. What she found instead, as the screws of Islamic repression were tightened, was a "perverse intimacy of victim and jailor" that she repeatedly compares to Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading.

In truth, unless you need to brush up on your Nabokov or Henry James, the interweaving of textual exegesis and personal memoir feels like padding ofor a distracting lecture fromNafisi's valuable account. But one point she makes, and a good one, is the personal dissociation necessary to live under a totalitarian regimethe creation of an "other self" to endure the daily indignities of the veil, pat-down searches, censorship, and worse. (Many intellectuals were imprisoned and executed by Iran's secret police.) "I felt light and fictional," Nafisi recalls. "Life had acquired the texture of fiction written by a bad writer." She finds herself acting according to the often absurd script of Khomeini's Iran, then tries to tweak her role. This places her in the tradition of what might be called the literature of totalitarianismlike Kafka, Kundera, or Havel, if she were more the writer, less the professor.

Still, even while wading through the academic infighting, book-club gossiping, and occasional Häagen-Dazs moments of weakness and self-doubt, you're always keen to follow Nafisi's basic story: How will she cope with the clampdown? Then: Will she get out? It's not the most suspenseful or insightful memoir ever written, but it's one of the few to date that address an intolerant regime that may soon be changed.

Brian Miller

Azar Nafisi will read at Elliott Bay Books (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 7:30 p.m. Fri., April 25.

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FUTURE SHOCKS

Bill McKibben is a writer who sniffs out the worst big-picture trends, thinks about them deeply, takes them seriously, explores the margins, then returns with a warning. Fortunately, his life expectancy has exceeded that of a coal-mine canary. He's made a career out of telling us what we don't want to hear about the consequences of our best intentions. The End of Nature made him famous; now Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (Times Books, $25) sounds a warning that may seem like a kind of Luddite liberal's hysteria. First, McKibben says, we seized control of nature; now, we're literally about to change what it means to be human. We're standing "on the edge of disappearing even as individuals." Technology that has been the stuff of science fiction is about to become reality: genetic tinkering to create "enhanced" humans; nanotechnology that blurs the line between man and machine; the ability to turn our progeny into engineered products that can be upgraded or discarded like last year's software. Just as we have stripped sacredness from nature, we're now prepared to remove the natural from the human. If you think genetically altered Frankenfoods are a global disaster, just wait until Monsanto does people.

Far from being science fiction, McKibben argues, these technological capabilities are near-term potential realities. The proliferation of Petri-dish tech may be unstoppable. Unless, of course, we say "Enough!" In the tradition of other New Englanders, like Henry David Thoreau and ecologist George Perkins Marsh, McKibben finds hope in what he says is the one essential human characteristic we have at our disposal: the ability to exercise self-restraint. A set of values that finds beauty and abundance in what one has, rather than the endless striving for more, is our thin green line of defense against self-devouring progress. We faced the same dilemma in the Garden of Eden. McKibben suggests that, in search of more, we are now about to leave the land of our banishment for even harsher zones beyond. Unless we simply refuse to go.

Knute Berger

Bill McKibben will read at Elliott Bay Books (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 7:30 p.m. Mon., April 28.

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FLOTSAM AND JETSAM
the Hero of Robert Stone's lightweight yet lumbering novel Bay of Souls (Houghton Mifflin, $25) is Michael Ahearn, an English professor at a mediocre college in what might as well be Lake Wobegon, Minn.the kind of place where in bitterest winter fresh-killed deer hang frozen in the trees. His big-boned, bucktoothed Norwegian American academic wife suspects him of groping his gorgeous grad-student assistant; in fact, his mistress is an empty wet dream of a dame named Lara Purcell, from the Caribbean isle of St. Trinity via the Sorbonne. Michael's drinking/hunting buddies call her "the hottest babe in the history of the state." She plays squash ruthlessly; when Michael flirtingly suggests he might beat her, she purrs, "I'll have your soft heart on a dish." Later on, she fires great blow up his midlife schnozz, makes him fuck and choke her, and quotes moony, swoony lines from Rilke about the revivifying effects of morbidity: "And we? We glow as one, a new creature invigorated by death."