The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (2014) By Azar Nafisi

For a variety of reasons, it has been a year since I’ve posted a review on my Blog.  Now, as I return to this avocation of mine, I want to lead off with a book extolling the virtues of literature, its importance to understanding the world, and which dove-tails nicely with one of my favorite niches, immigrant stories.

My recent reading habits have trended toward books set in other countries and cultures, and usually first published in languages other than English.  By accessing “their” literature, a window has opened to me on worlds I haven’t known.  With The Republic of Imagination, author Azar Nafisi has turned the tables, using American literature to gain a world view on the United States.  She has come to know us rather well, and she is now an American citizen.

Though you may not remember her name, you have probably heard of the author, or at least of her best-seller: Reading Lolita in Tehran.  She once was a professor of English Literature in her native Iran, until the Islamic Revolution convinced her it was time to leave. This new book discusses fiction as an antidote to that kind of rigid ideology, wherever in geography it may occur.  

With a subtitle of America in Three Books (she wanted 25, her editor said absolutely not), Nafisi discusses how a country’s literary classics can help shape peoples opinion of it.  While she covers the map -- or more aptly “the entire library” – she speaks in detail about three specific American classics:  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain; Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis; and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers.  Huck Finn is clearly her favorite, though her epilogue includes her “current read” James Baldwin, zeroing in on my favorite book, his Another Country.

And when I say she speaks “in detail,” I mean it.  I rapidly discovered that even though he is endemic to America, and Americana, it’s been 50 years since I’ve read Huck.  It needs to jump to the front of my re-read list.  Babbitt is something I read a bit more recently; and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a work that I’ve never read – though I am familiar with McCullers’ groundbreaking Reflections in a Golden Eye.

The underlying essay of The Republic of Imagination is that these books are not going to provide you a textbook understanding of the country, they won’t help you pass a citizenship examine, and they aren’t even part of the “Common Core” (which she savages) any longer.  They will however help others understand the American character, or “psyche” if you will, and the emotional basis of America as geography, and how all of this plays to the rest of the world.

A point she repeatedly makes is that because these works of literature are about fictional people, they allow the reader, particularly the non-American reader, to use their imagination to shape what America must really be like, not what the powers that be – U.S or Iranian -- describe it as.  

She writes: “When Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there were still physical territories to light out to, but in twenty-first-century America, such uncharted terrain is part of fiction as well as fantasy.  The only way to light out, to see the ‘sivilized’ world through fresh eyes, is through our imaginations, our hearts and our minds …”

If you are a book worm, you’ll love this book.