After finishing this book I felt that I had had an education and brief introduction into modern Persian literature which is actually quite vast; which is something the "new orientalists" who write books like "Reading Lolita in Tehran" are happy to deny the existence of in order to pander to the self serving preconceptions held by the West about the paucity of great writing and novels in an Islamic country.

I was so intrigued by learning from Fatemeh Keshavarz's book about contemporary authors like Moniru Ravanipur, Shahryar Mandanipur, Simin Daneshvar and Shahnush Parsipour that I started to research modern Persian authors and at last count I have found over 46 considered great by their countrymen and many internationally.

I have come to the conclusion that the only thing missing from contemporary Iranian literature is enough translations into English and other European languages to educate the Western world that Iran is in a literary renaissance rather than a Dark Age. Yes many Iranian writers have served time in jail under the Qajars, under the Pahlavis and under the IRI for writing things critical of the regimes but nothing can stop the writers and the film makers who like water encountering an obstruction flow under it, around it, over it, through it or when split up into a thousand rivulets regroup where ever they find the deepest hole.

As we concluded in my interview with film maker, Parvin Ansary a few years ago, great literary and artistic periods of creativity do not come from times of prosperity and comfort but rather fluorish in times of chaos and suffering like Italian cinema after World War II when Italy was broken before it became too affluent to be driven to creativity, like the earlier Italian Renaissance which people from today's perspective forget was a time of struggle, intrigue, internecine wars and chaos...it is from a struggle for identity, a unique identity both on an individual basis and as a society and nation that great works of art are born...it is not from micmicry of the West.

Iran has made contributions to world literature from the second millenium BC, all the way to the present day and continues to do so. We have Ferdowsi,Al Ghazali, Nizami, Attar, Rumi, Khayyam and many others from the past but we also have Forough Farrokhzad,Akhavan Sales,
M.A. Jamalzadeh, Sadeg Hedayat, Bozorg Alavi, Beh' Azin, Sadeg Chubak, Ebrahim Golestan, Iradj Pezeshkhzad, Jalal Mir-Sadegi, Gholan Horayu Nazari, Esma'il Fasih, Gholam Hosayn Sa'edi, Nader Ebrahimi, Bahram Sadegi, Hushang Golshiri, Fereydun Tonokaboni, Goli Taruggi, Mahsid Amir-Shahi, Mahmud Dowlatabadi, Nasim Khaksar, Amin Faqiri, Hushang Ashurzadeh, Farahnaz Abassi,Taghi Modarresi, Ali-Mohammad Afghani, Abbas Marufi, Hormoz Shahdadi, Reza Baraheni,Ghazaleh Alizadeh,Fereshteh Saari,Farideh Farjam...the list goes on and on and contemporary Persian literature is huge and still growing right now as we speak... to see photos of these writers, whom I emphasize are both genders, go to:

[...]

The amazing thing to me is that a person like the author of Reading Lolita In Tehran, could be satisfied ignoring her own country's stellar literary inundation of talent taking advantage of the relative ignorance of the West about Persian writing, to suggest that the novel doesn't exit in the IRI, what Keshavarz refers to as a continuation of the Bakhtinian perception that the written form of a novel is of Western origin, to focus on a few Western authors like Fitzgerald, James, Austen and Nabakov,not even contemporary anymore
, and by inference and omission, present her own countrymen as if they are void of writers on issues of birth, death, puberty, virginity, adolescence, women's rights, marriage, divorce, love, crime, rape,anger, sorrow, jealousy,guilt, ambition, greed, spirituality and the whole array of human experience and emotion...but rather would have us believing they only write religious doctrines...and argue over how many angels can sit on the head of a pin...or whether men can have sex with chickens as long as they don't eat them for a week after...at one of her lectures which I attended she suggested that trying to reason with the IRI was like playing chess with a monkey who at a certain point grabs your queen and swallows it. How very convenient to over simplify, dehumanize and demonize an entire nation of 70 million people 70 % of whom are under age 30. You have to question the motives of any of these "new orientalist" writers who pick the worst moment in time or a particular slice of society and freeze the shot for eternity to represent that people. Any people can be skewed in this manner. If we froze the "Reign of Terror" after the French Revolution and presented it as the epitome of France...what would people think of France? If we dwell on the prison population per capita and crime rates and statistics in the USA, we would come to the conclusion that there is no freedom, that there is anarchy and people live in constant fear of being victims of random crime. This is propaganda not literature.

I am forever grateful to Fatemeh Keshavarz for lifting a veil from my eyes with her book. I am now on a rampage to read every modern Persian writer I can find in translation especially the ones still living.

Brian H. Appleton
aka
Rasool Aryadust
www.zirzameen.com

This book is a combination of two things. One is a polemic against Azar Nafisi's flawed masterpiece Reading Lolita in Tehran (RLT). This polemic is deeply dishonest, with quotations lifted from RLT in clear violation of their meaning.
On the other hand, the author's memoirs of her highly educated family is charming and she has profound insights into Persian mysticism and its literature.
The problem is that the author walks on eggshells to portray her country in the best possible light. Even the brutal Islamic Republic gets the kid-glove treatment. A little intellectual honesty would have been appreciated by this reader.
For a more detailed review, please visit my blog article on it and leave a comment. http://iranwrites.blogspot.com/2007/12/jasmine-and-stars-reading-more-than.html

This book is a combination of two things. One is a polemic against Azar Nafisi's flawed masterpiece Reading Lolita in Tehran (RLT). This polemic is deeply dishonest, with quotations lifted from RLT in clear violation of their meaning.
On the other hand, the author's memoirs of her highly educated family is charming and she has profound insights into Persian mysticism and its literature.
The problem is that the author walks on eggshells to portray her country in the best possible light. Even the brutal Islamic Republic gets the kid-glove treatment. A little intellectual honesty would have been appreciated by this reader.
For a more detailed review, please visit my blog article on it and leave a comment. http://iranwrites.blogspot.com/2007/12/jasmine-and-stars-reading-more-than.html

I absolutely would recommend this book to anyone who is from Iran, thinks they understand Iran, or wants to understand that complex nation.

This book is by far the most balanced, honest, and unvarnished assessment of the complexities that escape so many analysts and authors who attempt to write about that country.

It also disassembles the perturbing pattern of modern day 'neo-orientalism' that is exemplified by Azar Nafisi's unfortunately best-selling "Reading Lolita in Tehran".

I HIGHLY recommend this book.

I just finished "Jasmine and Stars". I have recommended it to many of my friends and relatives. Keshavarz weaves anecdotes from her own life with excerpts and summaries from Persian literature. It is simply a fascinating and humanizing text especially if you are not familiar with Persian literature. It is a great introduction. After finishing it, I went back and wrote down the names of the text and authors Keshavarz cites. I am excited about reading these works in the future thanks to this text.

Jasmine and Stars is a compelling novel, warmly presented through the very personal narrative of Fatemeh Keshavarz, who explores the different voices of Iran, including two modern Iranian women writers and people of many statures. It does so in response to novels whose narratives present a paradigm of the world by which the existence of such people is improbable.

"What does the elephant look like?" poses Keshavarz. Jasmine and Stars begins by recounting the ancient Persian fable about villagers encountering an elephant for the first time and in the dark. One feels its trunk, the other its legs, and the other its ears. Later, when asked what the elephant looked like, one says the elephant is like a thin pole. The other says, "No, it is thick like a tree." The third says that the elephant is neither - instead the elephant is flat and round like a fan. Unable to see the whole picture, no one had truly learned what the elephant was. If only the villagers had a single candle, notes Keshavarz, they could have begun to learn its true nature. And so her book begins, in sincere search for a candle to help enlighten for us America's own elephant - Iran and the broader Middle East.

What is it about Iran that seems to elude our grasp? Why are we having so much trouble understanding the elephant? In fact, to many it would seem that there is nothing to understand beyond that which we already know. The media is filled with stories covering Iran, its president, the nuclear standoff, and - most significantly - the possibility of war. The internet is even more densely packed with stories and opinions. So, what is the problem?

The problem is that while there is a lot of monologue from twenty-four hour news feeds of sound bites and talking heads, there is almost no dialogue. The voices of Iranians themselves have been shut out. This essential humanizing factor of one culture speaking for itself to the other is strangely absent. How do they live? What do they value? And what is the interplay of their culture upon their lives? Iran is always spoken for instead of listened to. The product of this is a very distorted and narrow perception of what the elephant is. Even worse, it creates the grounds for the dehumanization of a nation, facilitating the path to conflict.

These missing voices, the cause of their absence, and the anecdote for their return are the subjects of Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran.

The author, Fatemeh Keshavarz, is an accomplished professor of Persian and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis, currently serving as the chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. An Iranian American, she was born in the city of Shiraz, Iran, and has lived and worked in the United States for nearly three decades, visiting Iran every year. Keshavarz describes herself as "a Muslim, a feminist, a literary scholar, and a poet, though not always in that order."

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand Iran and the Middle East.

Jasmine and Stars is a compelling novel, warmly presented through the very personal narrative of Fatemeh Keshavarz, who explores the different voices of Iran, including two modern Iranian women writers and people of many statures. It does so in response to novels whose narratives present a paradigm of the world by which the existence of such people is improbable.

"What does the elephant look like?" poses Keshavarz. Jasmine and Stars begins by recounting the ancient Persian fable about villagers encountering an elephant for the first time and in the dark. One feels its trunk, the other its legs, and the other its ears. Later, when asked what the elephant looked like, one says the elephant is like a thin pole. The other says, "No, it is thick like a tree." The third says that the elephant is neither - instead the elephant is flat and round like a fan. Unable to see the whole picture, no one had truly learned what the elephant was. If only the villagers had a single candle, notes Keshavarz, they could have begun to learn its true nature. And so her book begins, in sincere search for a candle to help enlighten for us America's own elephant - Iran and the broader Middle East.

What is it about Iran that seems to elude our grasp? Why are we having so much trouble understanding the elephant? In fact, to many it would seem that there is nothing to understand beyond that which we already know. The media is filled with stories covering Iran, its president, the nuclear standoff, and - most significantly - the possibility of war. The internet is even more densely packed with stories and opinions. So, what is the problem?

The problem is that while there is a lot of monologue from twenty-four hour news feeds of sound bites and talking heads, there is almost no dialogue. The voices of Iranians themselves have been shut out. This essential humanizing factor of one culture speaking for itself to the other is strangely absent. How do they live? What do they value? And what is the interplay of their culture upon their lives? Iran is always spoken for instead of listened to. The product of this is a very distorted and narrow perception of what the elephant is. Even worse, it creates the grounds for the dehumanization of a nation, facilitating the path to conflict.

These missing voices, the cause of their absence, and the anecdote for their return are the subjects of Jasmine and Stars: Reading more than Lolita in Tehran.

The author, Fatemeh Keshavarz, is an accomplished professor of Persian and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis, currently serving as the chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. An Iranian American, she was born in the city of Shiraz, Iran, and has lived and worked in the United States for nearly three decades, visiting Iran every year. Keshavarz describes herself as "a Muslim, a feminist, a literary scholar, and a poet, though not always in that order."

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand Iran and the Middle East.

This is a book about another book about Iran: Reading Lolita in Tehran. The author's main point is that Azar Nafisi has exaggerated much about Iran. Keshavarz has a point, but she loses me when she suggests that the pro-regime thugs who intimidate the population are misunderstood--their zealotry must be excused because of the Shah's dictatorship!!!

I am very happy that I took the time to read "Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran" by Fetemeh Keshavarz. It was definitely worth the effort and provided me with many vivid positive images of life in modern Iran. I recommend it highly to all who seek a clearer understanding of the people and culture of modern Iran.

The larger part of this book relates loving tales of life in modern Iran. These are deeply personal tales taken from the author's own life, and each is told in a gently loving and almost magical style. These are uplifting, liberating tales of everyday heroism, achievement, and humanity.

But other parts of the book were, for me at least, far less interesting. These parts are written in dense, academic prose and their purpose is to refute, from every detailed angle possible, all that the author found objectionable in Azar Nafisi's recent bestselling book "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books" She finds fault with much of that book, and, personally, I sense genuine intolerance and psychological blindness in much of her criticism.

It was only recently that I read Nafisi's book, "Reading Lolita in Tehran", and that is why I picked up a copy of Keshavarz' book, to see what she had to say from a different point of view. I, like many people in the West, are extremely curious to understand the people in this part of the world. If Kashavarz had a different point of view, I wanted to hear it.

Keshavarz is an Iranian-American. She loves both countries and very frequently makes visits to Tehran to visit friends and family. She is welcome there and easily adapts to both cultures. She is a scholar of Persian and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Recently, she has become an outspoken voice for a large Iranian-American community living productive and happy lives in America. This community is fearful about what they see as a "New Orientalist" narrative arising in the West. Let me explain. The old (primarily 18th- and 19th-century) Orientalist narrative sought to justify the colonial presence of Europe in the Eastern Hemisphere. The authors were European philologists. Kashavarz goes to great lengths in this book to argue that a "New Orientalism" has emerged in the West in the last few years, particularly since 9/11.

"The emerging Orientalist narrative has many similarities to and a few difference from this earlier incarnation. It equally simplifies its subject. For example, it explains almost all undesirable Middle Eastern incidents in terms of Muslim men's submission to God and Muslim women's submission to men. The old narrative was imbued with the authority of an all-knowing foreign expert. The emerging narrative varies somewhat in that it might have a native--or seminative--insider tone. Furthermore, as the product of a self-questioning era, it shows a relative awareness of its own possible shortcomings. Yet it replicates the earlier narrative's strong undercurrent of superiority and of impatience with the locals, who are often portrayed as uncomplicated. The new narrative does not necessarily support overt colonial ambitions. But it does not hide its clear preference for western political and cultural takeover. Most importantly, it replicates the totalizing--and silencing--tendencies of the old Orientalists by virtue of erasing, through unnuanced narration, the complexity and richness of the local culture" (p. 3).

Kashavarz' purpose is thus twofold: first, to refute in detail all that she finds objectionable in Nafisi's book; and second, to provide abundant examples of the common humanity shared by the peoples of Iran and the West. In this manner she hopes to expose the irrelevance of prevalent stereotypes about Muslim culture that have recently been exacerbated by bestselling "New Orientalist" narratives such as: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi, "The Hidden World of Islamic Women" by Geraldine Brookes, "The Bookseller of Kabul" by Asne Seierstad, and "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Husseini. To Kashavarz, and others in the wider immigrant Muslim community in the West, these books foster otherness and difference. What Kashavarz and this wider community of Muslim want is clear and simple: The West needs to learn to better understand and then fully to respect their culture. In Kashavarz' words:

"Flying airplanes into buildings, keeping prisoners of war out of reach of the law, beheading those who might vaguely sympathize with the `enemy,' setting off bombs in subway cars, and dragging the largest army of the world halfway across the globe to fight imaginary weapons of mass destruction are signs of big trouble. This environment festering with suspicion and hatred needs a more sophisticated global perspective, one geared toward respect, recognition, and healing" (p. 113).

Evidently, many in the immigrant Muslim American community are fearful that these "New Orientalist" narratives are providing the West with insider "evidence" that people from this part of the world are, in large part, the underdeveloped "Orientals" that everyone thought they were. Daily, they see the mass media enforcing this simplified image: that all that Muslims "do is pray, suppress women, and grow angry at the West" (p. 71).

Throughout the book there are numerous examples of great modern Iranian literature--literature that flies in the face of current stereotypical images of what we in the West may believe possible within their supposedly much more restrictive culture. For me, this was one of the best reasons to read Kashavarz' book. I came away from this book with a strong desire to read many of the titles she suggests, all of which are available in English translation.

In my estimation, both Kashavarz' and Nafisi's books, offer great insight. If there is truth, it must be found somewhere between the two. Kashavarz' main mistake in criticizing "Reading Lolita in Tehran" is that she does not validate Nafisi's right to have negative views about some aspects of her former country. Nafisi lived through the Iranian Revolution. She was teaching at Tehran University at the center of radicalism during the heart of the conflict. She was witness to many atrocities on a very personal level. These are events that have carved a deep scar on her psyche. Where was Kashavarz during the upheaval and chaos of the Iranian Revolution? Well, she left Iran in September of 1979 "to carry out her graduate studies at London University" (p. 47). On the same page, she reveals: "When I left Iran, I left Ati with my parents, hoping I could bring her over after I settled into my new environment. Little did I know that a war would break out between Iran and Iraq and I would not see my daughter, only eight years old at the time, for another seven years." That, I am afraid, is perhaps the only negative statement about Iran that Kashavarz allows herself to make in this entire book! It speaks volumes for what has been left out of her narrative. Need I say more?

But, please, DO consider reading this book. I recommend this book highly. It will open your eyes.

This is an excellent gut check. We are prone to look at the world black-&-white and forget the nuances. This book reminds us that political and even religious identification does not determine the whole of a person's, country's, or culture's identity. Real people with real interests, loves, relationships, etc. lie behind all the rhetoric.

I thoroughly enjoyed Jasmine and Stars. A while ago I tried to read Reading Lolita in Tehran but started skimming after the first 20 pages and have yet to get past about page 50. I was not clear on my problem with this bestseller. Keshavarz explication of the New Orientalist answered that question for me. I am not interested in whitewashing oppression and fundamentalism, but I find Jasmine and Stars puts such issues in their proper perspective.

I am an Anglo who is very interested in learning more about Muslim culture. My wife and I experienced a wonderful 10 day intensive trip to Turkey this past spring that focused on interaction in the homes of Turkish people in a half dozen cities. That trip, along with general experiences before and since have led me to more deeply explore the richness of the cultures where Islam predominates. Jasmine and Stars does a very credible job of presenting the cultural legacy of Iran.

I enjoyed reading this book immensely. I stayed up until 3 am in the morning to finish it. I love this book's wonderfully gentle method of
pointing out the flaws of Reading Lolita in Tehran. But more importantly I love the author's elegant method in humanizing the Iranian People. She sucessfully shows that there are many shades of belief in Iran. She also sucessfully demonstrates the struggles facing intellectuals and writers in post-revolutionary Iran. Reading this gentle, logical, and cultured personal account is absolutly necessary for anyone wanting to get a crash course in Modern Iranian Culture.