Who’s reading Lolita in Tehran?

Self-help books and their eclectic offshoots, on topics like Indian spirituality and feng shui, enjoy the most prominent position on bookstore front tables. The emergence of the genre, which did not exist before the 1979 Islamic revolution, may suggest a culture trying to cope with the erosion of traditional gender roles, or with rising rates of divorce and premarital sex. But Iranian intellectuals are quick to blame ‘‘cultural repression and spiritual crisis’’.

The success of translated titles like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus has given rise to some homegrown authors’ specialising in more culturally specific advice. The title of one current bestseller, Mahmoud Namany’s Please Do Not Be a Sheep, is borrowed from Ali Shariati, the Islamist sociologist who helped inspire the revolution.

When Iranians aren’t reading about depression or the harmonious arrangement of furniture, they’re drawn to soap-opera-ish novels about family life and chaste, unrequited love, bearing titles like The Solitude of Lonely Nights.

After the revolution, which created a caste of literate women with no more social clubs or cultural centres to frequent, the market for women’s popular fiction swelled. Demand is highest for Persian translations of Danielle Steel and her Iranian equivalents, Fahimeh Rahimi and M. Moaddabpour.

When I arrived seven years ago, writers and publishers were making the same predictions about the impending death of reading heard perennially in the US. In a nation of 70 million with a nearly 80 per cent literacy rate and a centuries-old literary tradition, they argued, book sales—40,000 copies for a typical commercial best seller and 2,000 to 5,000 for novels and literary nonfiction—were dismal.

Even the government is growing concerned. In advance of the Tehran Book Fair, held this month, the state newspaper, Iran, published a scolding article under the headline ‘Let Us Learn How to Read.’ In April, an announcer on state radio lamented that the average Iranian spends only 16 seconds a day reading.

From 1999 to 2002, during the hopeful presidency of the reform-minded Mohammad Khatami (a former head of Iran’s national library), Iran seemed to be undergoing a literary revival. But much like the Khatami era itself, Tehran’s literary spring was fleeting. Independent journalists published a handful of daring books, most importantly Akbar Ganji’s Dark House of Ghosts, which implicated senior officials in the killings of intellectuals in the late 1990s. But as the hardline establishment cracked down, several journalist-authors went to prison, and many in-store cafes were closed on various pretexts. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance was chastised for relaxing its standards and resumed vetting books with the same humorless strictness.

Occasionally, a work of homegrown fiction manages to be both absorbing and benign by the standards of Islamic decency. Saideh Ghods’s best-selling novel Kimia Khatoun, which revisits the life of Shams-e Tabrizi, the Sufi mystic who inspired the poetry of Rumi, from the perspective of Tabrizi’s discontented wife, is a case in point.

Still, for every successful novel, there are 10 that never make it past the censor or off the author’s desk. For some, literary journalism offers something of a way out. Though they practice self-censorship, the dozens of small magazines that thrive in Iran find themselves less constricted. With circulations of 2,000 to 5,000, they offer a melange of criticism, essays and sketches by accomplished writers who in a different Iran would be writing books. ‘‘Since people don’t trust books anymore, it is the journals that are keeping literary culture alive,’’ Reza Seyyed Hosseini, Iran’s pre-eminent translator of French literature, said.

Azadeh Moaveni, who reports from Tehran for Time, is the author of Lipstick Jihad and she co-wrote Shirin Ebadi’s memoir