Subtly, between the pages of memoir and of literary and political criticism, this book deals with the uncertain and uneasy solipsism of the world. The way in which the totalitarian, theocratic regime seeks to impose its will on the women of Tehran is certainly horrific. Girls are forbidden to have any sort of color in their attire or about their person, as if someone the very existence of color would challenge the monochromatic existence of the regime. All must wear dark-colored robes related to the chador, and similarly dark veils that must cover every strand of hair; they must not wear lipstick or fingernail polish, or even pink socks. This robe makes women almost indistinguishable, a situation heightened by the Islamic prohibition against looking directly at unrelated women; Nafisi imagines that it makes her invisible, "I pretended that when I wore the robe, my whole body disappeared." (Nafisi, 167) in wearing the robe and assuming this costume, the women become converted into actors in their own lives. "These girls... had both a real history and a fabricated one... The regime's definition of them as Muslim women." (Nafisi, 27-28) Throughout the book Nafisi speaks of the way that being so obscured seems to steal away the very existence of women who "do not quite exist, because they leave no trace..." (Nafisi, 19) Women who defy the system are jailed, tortured, or even killed.

The way in which the system seeks to ignore the women's real lives and force them into another, subservient, role is compared metaphorically by Nafisi and her class to the plight of Nabokov's character Lolita. Just as H.H. says of Lolita, "I simply...

Yet it does not do so unaided, "The worst crime committed by totalitarian mindsets is that they force their...victims... To become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer..." (Nafisi, 76) Women are forced, in order to survive, to partake in the very system that keeps them enslaved. One notices that Nafisi herself, when required to stay home, decides to have children . . . one of whom she will eventually dress in a veil to attend school. All the women willingly veil themselves, and try to obey the laws --at least publicly. Yet this is not to say that they do not resist to some degree. Their resistance takes place in a single room in Nafisi's house.
This resistance is not political or military, or even physical. They resist purely within their own minds, by creating an imaginary, fictional world in which there are colors and passions which are forbidden outside. One female artists speaks of her new abstract style of painting by saying, "Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams" (Nafisi, 11) the idea of painting or imagining dreams instead of reality, as a way of transforming reality, is consistent. "He [Nabokov] kept on writing his solitary prose while he heard the guns... Let us see... [if] faith will reward us reward by transforming the gloomy reality [here]." (Nafisi, 19) the girls who study fiction are, in particular, attempting to access the world of their ...