THINGS I'VE BEEN SILENT ABOUT(ISBN=9780812973907) 英文原版 下载 mobi 免费 pdf 百度网盘 epub 2025 在线 电子书

In this stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, Azar Nafisi shares her memories of living in thrall to a powerful and complex mother against the backdrop of a country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets, a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature, the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by upheaval—these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first place” (Newsday).

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

RPOLOGUE

PART ONE FAMILY FICTIONS

PPRT TWO LESSONS AND LEARNING

PPRT THREE MY FATHER'S JAIL

PART FOUR RBVILTS AND REVOLUTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SUGGESTED READING LIST

SUGGED READING LIST

MOMENTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRNIAN HISTORY

GLOSSARY

暂无相关内容，正在全力查找中

暂无出版社相关信息，正在全力查找中！

暂无相关书籍摘录，正在全力查找中！

在线阅读地址：THINGS I'VE BEEN SILENT ABOUT(ISBN=9780812973907) 英文原版在线阅读

在线听书地址：THINGS I'VE BEEN SILENT ABOUT(ISBN=9780812973907) 英文原版在线收听

在线购买地址：THINGS I'VE BEEN SILENT ABOUT(ISBN=9780812973907) 英文原版在线购买

在人生的每一个转折点，母亲都未能趁机扭转她和家人的关系，并不是因为他们不愿意改变对她的态度，而是她无法改变她自己的态度。最后，她反而让他们伤害她的能力永远地存续下来。而她内心的憎恨和骄傲，也终于变成了恶意而有害的存在。

我们私人的恐惧和情感有时候比公共威胁还要强大。因为·直被当作秘密隐藏起来，它便被恶意地长久根植于我们的内心深处你只有将它表达出来，它才会消失；而想要表达出来，你首先要承认它的存在：我可以讨论和抵制政治上的不公，但我无法面对那天下午在父母家花园里发生的事情。数十年来，直到我也上了年纪，性对我来说始终是—种妥协，是空洞的安抚之举。同时，这些年来我对父母一直都有种说不清道不明的愤怒，尤其是对母亲，因为他们没有保护我。我的愤怒满含着反讽的意味：母亲想要通过禁止我与同年纪的男孩见面来保护我却不知道那些她信任和欣赏的成年男人，才是真正伤害我的人。

几十年前，当我第一次和母亲发生正面冲突时，我四岁。我本能地意识到，我甚至没有把床移到我喜欢的位置的权力，这让我感到绝望。父亲教我幻想另一个世界以此寻找平静和安慰因为那个世界没有人能夺走。伊斯兰革命后我意识到我们在世间的存在是多么脆弱，给你带来安慰的家，你的自我意识，你的身份感、归属感，所有的一切都可以随时被夺走。从父亲教我的故事里，我学会在自己的世界里创造一个家这个家跟地理、国籍，以及其他任何能被夺走的东西都没有关系，任何人都不能把它夺走但这些故事不能减轻失去父母带给我的痛苦；它们也无法提供安慰或者终结直到他们死后我才意识到，他们分别用自己的方式给了我一个可以移动的家。这个家保护着我的回忆，持续地帮我抵制人和时间施加在我们身上的暴行。

集权主义者摧毁你的方式，不是通过强加于人，而是通过不可预期的善举。

在她所有的工程中，也许最大的雄心就是要建立一个时尚家庭。她小时候没人关心她：吃什么，有没有锻炼身体，穿什么衣服都没人过问。所以现在，她要我们都拥有。母亲努力地实现她的完美主义：完美的家庭，完美的朋友，完美的国家。集权主义者摧毁你的方式，不是通过强加于人，而是通过不可预期的善举。如果母亲只是一直残酷地对待我们，那我们很容易和她断绝关系。但事实却是，我们感觉被困住了。因为她在控制我们生活的同时，又表现出了极度的脆弱。尽管她有时候恨我，但她却同时为我牺牲了很多。她希望我成为一个美丽、圆滑、世故、聪明且听话的女儿，一个成功的、受过良好教育的职业女性。我也许是最让她失望的人。

看着我，也许会让她想起年轻时候的自己——被忽略又被讨厌。意识到这一点，让我心痛。

这形成了我们后来的相处模式：分开时，母亲和我总是渴望对方。但是一旦在一起几天，最多一周，我们就变回吵吵闹闹的老样子。

「艺术可以提供给我们一种活在不同时代的可能性。每个人都只能活一次，也只能从一个角度去活，只有艺术能创造出其他不同的视角。」每当我想起这句话，我就感激伊朗伊斯兰共和国：它通过剥夺我们想象的快乐、爱的快乐以及文化的快乐，反而把我们带向了它们。没有任何权威能够强制让这个精灵回到瓶子里。

媒体评论

　　Absorbing . . . a testament to the ways in which narrative

truth-telling—from the greatest works of literature to the most

intimate family stories—sustains and strengthens us.”—O: The Oprah

Magazine

　　“Deeply felt . . . an affecting account of a family’s

struggle.”—New York Times

　　“A gifted storyteller with a mastery of Western literature,

Nafisi knows how to use language both to settle scores and to

seduce.”—New York Times Book Review

　　 “An immensely rewarding and beautifully written act of courage,

by turns amusing, tender and obsessively dogged.”—Kirkus Reviews,

starred review

　　“A lyrical, often wrenching memoir.”—People

　　Azar Nafisi is a visiting professor and the director of the

Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins

University. She has taught Western literature at the University of

Tehran, the Free Islamic University, and the University of Allameh

Tabatabai in Iran. In 1981 she was expelled from the University of

Tehran after refusing to wear the veil. In 1994 she won a teaching

fellowship from Oxford University, and in 1997 she and her family

left Iran for America. She has written for The New York Times, The

Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic and

has appeared on countless radio and television programs. She lives

in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.

　　From the Hardcover edition. In this stunning personal story of

growing up in Iran, Azar Nafisi shares her memories of living in

thrall to a powerful and complex mother against the backdrop of a

country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets,

a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature,

the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by

upheaval—these and other threads are woven together in this

beautiful memoir as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the

way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first

place” (Newsday)

　　Chapter 1

　　Saifi

　　I have often asked myself how much of my mother’s account of her

meeting with her first husband was a figment of her imagination. If

not for the photographs, I would have doubted that he had ever

existed. A friend once talked of my mother’s “admirable resistance

to the unwanted,” and since, for her, so much in life was unwanted,

she invented stories about herself that she came to believe with

such conviction that we started doubting our own certainties.

　　In her mind their courtship began with a dance. It seemed more

likely to me that his parents would have asked her father for her

hand, a marriage of convenience between two prominent families, as

had been the convention in Tehran in the 1940s. But over the years

she never changed this story, the way she did so many of her other

accounts. She had met him at her uncle’s wedding. She was careful

to mention that in the morning she wore a flowery crêpe-de-chine

dress and in the evening one made of duchess satin, and they danced

all evening (“After my father had left,” she would say, and then

immediately add, “because no one dared dance with me in my father’s

presence”). The next day he asked for her hand in marriage.

　　Saifi! I cannot remember ever hearing his last name spoken in our

house. We should have called him—with the echo of proper distance—

Mother’s first husband, or perhaps by his full title, Saif ol Molk

Bayat, but to me he was always Saifi, good-naturedly part of our

routine. He insinuated himself into our lives with the same ease

with which he stood behind her in their wedding pictures, appearing

unexpectedly and slyly whirling her away from us. I have two photos

from that day—more than we ever had of my own parents’ wedding.

Saifi appears relaxed and affable, with his light hair and hazel

eyes, while my mother, who is in the middle of the group, stands

frozen like a solitary centerpiece. He seems nonchalantly,

confidently happy. But perhaps I am wrong and what I see on his

face is not hope but utter hopelessness. Because he too has his

secrets.

　　There was something about her story that always bothered me, even

as a child. It seemed not so much untrue as wrong. Most people have

a way of radiating their potential, not just what they are but what

they could become. I wouldn’t say my mother didn’t have the

potential to dance. It is worse than that. She wouldn’t dance, even

though, by all accounts, she was a good dancer. Dancing would have

implied pleasure, and she took great pride in denying herself

pleasure or any such indulgences.

　　All through my childhood and youth, and even now in this city so

far removed from the Tehran that I remember, the shadow of that

other ghostly woman who danced and smiled and loved disturbs the

memories of the one I knew as my mother. I have a feeling that if

somehow I could understand just when she stopped dancing—when she

stopped wanting to dance—I would find the key to my mother’s riddle

and finally make my peace with her. For I resisted my mother—if you

believe her stories—almost from the start.

　　I have three photographs of my mother and Saifi. Two are of their

wedding, but I am interested in the third, a much smaller picture

of them out on a picnic, sitting on a rock. They are both looking

into the camera, smiling. She is holding onto him in the casual

manner of people who are intimate and do not need to hold onto one

another too tightly. Their bodies seem to naturally gravitate

together. Looking at the photograph, I can see the possibility of

this young, perhaps not yet frigid, woman letting go.

　　I find in the photograph the sensuality that we always missed in

my mother in real life. When? I would say, when did you graduate

from high school? How many years later did you marry Saifi? What

did he do? When did you meet Father? Simple questions that she

never really answered. She was too immersed in her own inner world

to be bothered by such details. No matter what I asked her, she

would tell me the same stock stories, which I knew almost by heart.

Later, when I left Iran, I asked one of my students to interview

her and I gave specific questions to ask, but I got back the same

stories. No dates, no concrete facts, nothing that went outside my

mother’s set *.

　　A few years ago, at a family gathering, I ran into a lovely

Austrian lady, the wife of a distant relative, who had been present

at my mother’s wedding to Saifi. One reason she remembered the

wedding so clearly was the panic and confusion caused by the

mysterious disappearance of the bride’s birth certificate. (In

Iran, marriages and children are recorded on birth certificates.)

She told me, with the twinkle of a smile, that it was later

discovered that the bride was a few years older than the groom.

Mother’s most recent birth certificate makes no mention of her

first marriage. According to this document, which replaced the one

she claimed to have lost, she was born in 1920. But she maintained

that she was really born in 1924 and that her father had added four

years to her age because he wanted to send her to school early. My

father told us that my mother had actually subtracted four years

from her real age when she picked up the new birth certificate,

which she needed so that she could apply for a driver’s license.

When the facts did not suit her, my mother would go to great

lengths to refashion them altogether.

　　Some facts are on record. Her father-in-law, Saham Soltan Bayat,

was a wealthy landowner who had seen one royal dynasty, the Qajars

(1794–1925), replaced by another, the Pahlavis (1925–79). He

managed to survive, even thrive, through the change in power.

Mother sometimes boasted that she was related to Saifi on her

mother’s side and that they were both descendants of Qajar kings.

During the fifties and sixties when I was growing up, being related

to the Qajars, who, according to the official history books,

represented the old absolutist system, was no feather in anyone’s

cap. My father would remind us mischievously that all Iranians were

in one way or another related to the Qajars. In fact, he would say,

those who could not find any connections to the Qajars were the

truly privileged. The Qajars had reigned over the country for 131

years, and had numerous wives and offspring. Like the kings that

came before them, they seemed to have picked their wives from all

ranks and classes, possessing whoever caught their fancy:

princesses, gardeners’ daughters, poor village girls, all were part

of their collection. One Qajar king, Fath Ali Shah (1771–1834), is

said to have had 160 wives. Being of a judicious mind-?set, Father

would usually add that of course that was only part of the story,

and since history is written by the victors, especially in our

country, we should take all that is said about the Qajars with a

grain of salt—after all, it was during their reign that Iran

started to modernize. They had lost, so anything could be said of

them. Even as a child I sensed that Mother brought up this

connection to the Qajars more to slight her present life with

Father than to boast about the past. Her snobbism was arbitrary,

and her prejudices were restricted to the rules and laws of her own

personal kingdom

　　Saham Soltan, mother’s father-in-law, appears in various history

books and political memoirs—one line here, a paragraph there—once

as deputy and vice president of Parliament, twice as minister of

finance in the early 1940s, and as prime minister for a few months,

from November 1944 to April 1945—during the time my mother claims

to have been married to Saifi. Despite the fact that Iran had

declared neutrality in World War II, Reza Shah Pahlavi had made the

mistake of sympathizing with the Germans. The Allies, the British

and the Soviets in particular, who had an eye on the geopolitical

gains, occupied Iran in 1941, forced Reza Shah to abdicate, exiled

him to Johannesburg, and replaced him with his young and more

malleable son, Mohammad Reza. The Second World War triggered such

upheaval in Iran that between 1943 and 1944 four prime ministers

and seven ministers of finance were elected.

　　Mother knew little and seemed to care less about what kind of

prime minister her father-?in-?law had been. What was important was

that he played the fairy godfather to her degraded present. This is

how so many public figures entered my life, not through history

books but through my parents’ stories.

　　How glamorous mother’s life with Saifi really was is open to

debate. They lived at Saham Soltan’s house, in the chink of time

between the death of his first wife and his marriage to a much

younger and, according to my mother, quite detestable woman. In the

absence of a lady of the house, my mother did the honors.

“Everybody’s eyes were on me that first night,” she would tell us,

describing in elaborate detail the dress she had worn and the

impact of her flawless French. As a child I would picture her

coming down the stairs in her red chiffon dress, her black eyes

shining, her hair immaculately done.

　　“The first night Doctor Millspaugh came...you should have been

there!” Dr. Millspaugh, the head of the American Mission in the

1940s, had been assigned by both the Roosevelt and the Truman

administrations to help Tehran set up modern financial

institutions. Mother never saw any reason to tell us who this man

was, and for a long time, for some reason I was convinced that he

was Belgian. Later, when I reviewed my mother’s accounts of these

dinners, I was struck by the fact that Saifi was never present. His

father would always be there, and Dr. Millspaugh or some other

publicly important and personally insignificant character. But

where was Saifi? That was the tragedy of her life: the man at her

side was never the one she wanted.

　　My father, to bribe my brother and me into silence against her

impositions, and perhaps to compensate for... book 0307388433 The

Book of Firsts: 150 World-Changing People and Events from Caesar

Augustus to the Internet paperback D'Epiro, Peter Anchor 20100309

640 english ... carves up 2,000 years of history into easily

digestible portions. . . . The 150 essays . . . explain how a host

of inventions and developments in war, politics, science, religion,

art, and literature shaped the world.

　　--The Boston Globe Online

　　Every reader will quibble over what's in and what's out, yet

D'Epiro must be credited for writing a set of witty, sophisticated

short essays on some of history's turning points.

--ExpressMilwaukee.com

　　The Book of Firsts is a wonderfully engaging treasure trove of

information. . . . It can be read all the way through or savored in

small amounts. --blogcritics.org Peter D’Epiro received a B.A. and

M.A. from Queens College and his Ph.D. in English from Yale

University. He has taught English at the secondary and college

levels and worked as an editor and writer for thirty years. He has

written (with Mary Desmond Pinkowish) Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian

Genius Shaped the World (Anchor Books, 2001) and What Are the Seven

Wonders of the World? and 100 Other Great Cultural Lists—Fully

Explicated (Anchor Books, 1998), which has appeared in British,

German, Russian, Lithuanian, and Korean editions. He has also

published a book and several articles on Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a

book of translations of African-American poetry into Italian, and

rhymed verse translations from Dante’s Inferno. He has a grown son,

Dante, and lives with his wife, Nancy Walsh, in Ridgewood, New

Jersey.   The Book of Firsts is an entertaining,

enlightening, and highly browsable tour of the major innovations of

the past twenty centuries and how they shaped our world.

　　Peter D’Epiro makes this handy overview of human history both fun

and thought-provoking with his survey of the major

“firsts”—inventions, discoveries, political and military upheavals,

artistic and scientific breakthroughs, religious controversies, and

catastrophic events—of the last two thousand years. Who was the

first to use gunpowder? Invent paper? Sack the city of Rome? Write

a sonnet? What was the first university? The first astronomical

telescope? The first great novel? The first Impressionist painting?

The Book of Firsts explores these questions and many more, from the

earliest surviving cookbook (featuring parboiled flamingo) and the

origin of chess (sixth-century India) to the first civil service

exam (China in 606 AD) and the first tell-all memoir about

scandalous royals (Byzantine Emperor Justinian and Empress

Theodora). In the form of 150 brief, witty, erudite, and

information-packed essays, The Book of Firsts is ideal for anyone

interested in an enjoyable way to acquire a deeper understanding of

history and the fascinating personalities who forged it.  1.

Who was the first Roman emperor?

　　Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, aka Augustus

　　(reigned 27 BC-AD 14)

　　Long before they had an emperor, the ancient Romans had an

empire. Beginning with Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Spain, all

wrested from Carthage in the third century BC, the Roman republic

had strung together an imperial bastion of overseas possessions. By

the time Octavian seized sole control of the Roman world by

defeating his former ruling partner Mark Antony at the naval battle

of Actium in 31 BC, the legions sent out from the Eternal City on

the Tiber had conquered territories comprising most of Western

Europe and great swaths of northern Africa, the Balkans, Turkey,

Syria, and Judea. In the following year, Octavian converted the

late Cleopatra's massively wealthy Egyptian kingdom into just

another province of Rome.

　　After several generations of butchery in the successive civil

wars between Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, the assassins of

Julius Caesar (led by Brutus and Cassius) and the avengers of

Caesar (led by Octavian and Mark Antony), and, finally, between

Octavian and Antony, the Roman world was ready for peace and unity

at just about any price. It received them from a cagey young man,

handsome and intelligent but sickly and not overly courageous, who

had the fortune of being Julius Caesar's great-nephew, adoptive

son, and chief heir.

　　Caesar had been king of Rome in all but name, and that's why, in

44 BC, he was murdered at a meeting of the senate. Having thrown

out their last king more than four centuries earlier, the Romans

were fiercely proud of their republic presided over by magistrates

elected for one-year terms. Not only had Caesar had himself

declared dictator for life, he also affected an un-Roman

monarchical demeanor with his purple robes, scorn for the senate,

and godlike haughtiness. The Roman nobles feared Caesar, but they

hated him even more.

　　The lesson was not lost on young Octavian (63 BC-AD 14). He

graciously accepted from the senate the honorific Augustus

(revered, majestic, worthy of awe") on January 13, 27 BC, when, in

a staged little drama, he offered to resign the extraordinary

powers he had exercised since Caesar's death, and the senate made

him a counteroffer he couldn't refuse. But there would be no regal

pretensions in the public manner or official status of Augustus. He

was content to be princeps civitatis--first citizen--and princeps

senatus--leader of the senate (hence the English term Principate

for his regime). Meanwhile, he was lavished concurrently with the

key offices of the old Roman constitution--consul, proconsul,

tribune--which guaranteed his control of the civil government while

fostering the illusion that he had restored the republic by acting

only as a senior colleague of its traditional political

leaders.

　　But Augustus's main basis of power, as commander in chief of

Rome's armies, derived from his being proclaimed imperator, the

origin of our word emperor. An imperator was, at first, a Roman

military commander--the general of an army. Then the word was

applied to a general who had been acclaimed by his soldiers after a

victory and to a proconsul who held the military command of a

province. But the power of an imperator was always meant to be

limited in time and place.

　　When the senate eventually created Augustus imperator over the

entire empire and for life, prefixing the title to his name, it

officially sanctioned his control over all the military forces and

foreign possessions of Rome, and this is why historians consider

him the first Roman emperor. Subsequent emperors were invested with

the same title, which required the armies of Rome to swear

allegiance to them personally rather than to the state.

　　Vested with overall command of the Roman army, navy, provinces,

and a large personal army guard, the Praetorians, Augustus convened

the senate and initiated legislation that it rubber-stamped. He

made and unmade senators, he handpicked cronies to govern the most

critical territories of the empire in his name, and he deprived the

popular assemblies of their legislative or veto powers. The old

majestic formula for the twin pillars of the Roman state--senatus

populusque Romanus, the Roman senate and people--had become a

sham.

　　Though crafty and manipulative, Augustus, "that subtle tyrant" in

Edward Gibbon's phrase, was ruthless during his reign only when he

had to be, preferring to overlook petty affronts. He ruled the

Roman Empire for more than forty years, during which he ushered in

the era of peace known as the pax Romana, promoted family values

(though failing signally with his own debauched daughter and

granddaughter), and patronized the best writers of Rome's Golden

Age. Virgil's Aeneid, Horace's patriotic odes, and Livy's epic

history of Rome glorified the ancient Roman military and moral

virtues that Augustus was attempting to resurrect. (No paragon of

virtue himself, the Revered One and Father of His Country was

addicted to women and dice.) His massive building program led him

to boast that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city

of marble. For his own dwelling, he chose a site above the ancient

sanctuary where Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus, had supposedly

been suckled by a she-wolf on the Palatine Hill. Augustus's

residence was thus called the Palatium--the source of our word

palace.

　　The emperor's last years were clouded by a catastrophic Roman

defeat under the inept governor Varus in Germany, in which three

legions--more than twenty thousand men--were cut down in AD 9.

Augustus would bang his head against a door and shout, "Quinctilius

Varus, give me back my legions!" After a favorite nephew and two

grandsons died young, he reconciled himself to bequeathing his

position--and Rome's twenty-five legions--to his stepson and

adopted son Tiberius who, though a capable general and

administrator, had always struck the emperor as too proudly aloof,

morose, and temperamental to continue the Augustan constitutional

charade. But Tiberius went on to have a long reign of his own (AD

14-37), and the sometimes admirable, sometimes deranged men known

as Roman emperors succeeded to the throne until 476 in the Western

Empire and 1453 in the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, besides

inspiring Russian czars, German kaisers, and even an Italian

ex-socialist known as il Duce.

　　In the account he himself wrote of his remarkable career, which

was engraved on two bronze pillars in Rome and carved in stone

throughout the empire, Augustus sometimes blusters like Shelley's

Ozymandias: "In my triumphs there were led before my chariot nine

kings or children of kings" and "Twenty-six times I provided for

the people . . . hunting spectacles of African wild beasts . . . ;

in these exhibitions about three thousand and five hundred animals

were killed." He also can't resist one final iteration of the big

lie at the center of his administration: "After that time I

excelled all in authority, but I possessed no more power than the

others who were my colleagues in each magistracy."

　　The first, greatest, and longest-reigning of all the Roman

emperors died in his mid-seventies in AD 14, in the month that had

been renamed August in his honor, and he was promptly deified by

the compliant senate. On his deathbed, he summoned his friends and,

in the tradition of comic actors, asked for their applause if they

thought he had played his part well in the farce of life.

　　Did the hypocritical role assumed by this political actor fool

anyone? It all depends on your definition of fool. Roman

aristocrats realized they could prosper by administering Rome and

the empire in Augustus's name if they just threw a little

sycophancy into their lives. The chief writers of the time obtained

funds and farms from Augustus's cultural minister Maecenas, whose

name has become synonymous with enlightened patronage. The soldiers

got bonuses, while the common people got cheap food and

gladiatorial games. And in those far-off days of children being

seen and not heard, not one of them had ever dared shout out, "But

the emperor has no clothes!"

　　2. What was the first poetic handbook of Greek mythology?

　　Ovid's Metamorphoses, completed c. AD 8, one of the most

influential books of all time

　　Just before his banishment to frigid, semibarbarous Tomis on the

Black Sea coast by Caesar Augustus in AD 8 for an offense that may

have involved the emperor's slutty granddaughter Julia as well as a

sexy earlier work--a tongue-in-cheek seduction manual called The

Art of Love--the Roman poet Ovid completed his Metamorphoses, a

Latin poem of nearly twelve thousand hexameter lines. This treasure

trove of Greek myths is thematically unified by the miraculous

transformation of humans into beasts, birds, trees, plants, rocks,

bodies of water, and even heavenly bodies.

　　Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC-AD 17/18) set out to write a

different kind of epic from the martial sagas of Homer and Virgil.

His aim was to collect the most important Greek myths into a single

narrative with the leitmotif that all is constant flux in the

universe. The artistic problem was to keep the momentum going over

a sprawling and varied terrain, which Ovid solved by weaving myths

into other myths and quoting speakers who quote other speakers in a

kaleidoscopic orgy of narration that never degenerates into a

shaggy-dog story.

　　Ovid recounts about fifty myths in detail, such as that of

Narcissus, who falls in love with his reflection in a pool while

ignoring the proffered love of Echo (who pines away until only her

voice remains), and the tales of the famous lovers Hero and

Leander, Venus and Adonis, and Orpheus and Eurydice. The myth of

Daphne, changed into a laurel tree to save her from rape by Phoebus

Apollo, inspired one of Bernini's marble masterpieces, besides

countless literary retellings. In some pruriently macabre lines

from the tale, Ovid dramatizes the frustrated erotic desire of

Apollo, the original tree hugger:

　But Phoebus loves her even as a tree--placing his hand

书籍介绍

In this stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, Azar Nafisi shares her memories of living in thrall to a powerful and complex mother against the backdrop of a country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets, a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature, the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by upheaval—these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first place” (Newsday).