Books in Brief
Remembering Patsy by Brian Mansfield (Rutledge Hill, 95 pp., $14.99). Everybody likes Patsy Cline. Most of the popular country singers of the 1950s and 1960s have disappeared, known only to country music devotees. Who listens to Minnie Pearl anymore? Or Faron Young? But though Patsy Cline died forty years ago, her “Greatest Hits Collection” still sells millions of copies each year.
Her story–popularized in the 1985 film, Sweet Dreams–is both dramatic and sad. Like many country singers, Cline grew up poor and sang gospel as a girl. Her voice was both tender and big. She had great material too, including “Walkin’ After Midnight,” “I Fall to Pieces,” and Willie Nelson’s “Crazy”–stark, sentimental, richly melodic songs that, in an age of boundless irony, have acquired a certain exotic appeal. And then she died, at thirty, in an airplane crash. Her “lively eyes,” writes Brian Mansfield in “Remembering Patsy,” “haunt us from black-and-white photographs.”
Mansfield’s little book features about forty photos of Cline posing, performing, chatting amicably with other country stars. Most of these are generic publicity shots, but one–of Cline standing before a radio station microphone–shows something more. In it, the camera looks up at a woman with a splendidly full figure who wears a smart black hat and an elegantly cut suit. In nearly all the other pictures, Cline smiles widely. But here her face shows both intelligence and determination. It’s a singular face, broad and a bit tough, but sensuous and honest, too. Here, one thinks, is a woman one would like to know.
Remembering Patsy also includes anecdotes that confirm this view. Cline rose to stardom because, in addition to being talented, she was sassy and self-assured–“road-wise,” as Willie Nelson described her. She was no diva, but a woman who brought her checkbook to recording sessions and, during the delays, paid her bills. “I respected her,” notes singer Jim Ed Brown, “because she was what she was. There were no airs to Patsy”–a quality her records can’t conceal.
The singer and composer Roger Miller also recalls that Cline “loved to laugh. She had a good soul and a good heart. She was a really good person, a person you wanted to have in your corner.” And who could ask for a better tribute than that?
–Brian Murray
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (Random House, 368 pp., $23.95). The 1979 Iranian Revolution produced such obvious brutalities as men lashed for planning parties and female prisoners “married” to their guards, raped, and executed. But Azar Nafisi, in her evocative autobiography “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” documents the subtler brutality in the regime’s control over daily life. Everything was regulated, from how women should laugh to how men should wear their shirts. Deviations were punished with whips, jails, and humiliating searches.
In this totalitarian state, Nafisi taught the novel–a genre renowned for its attention to private life. She was eventually barred from the University of Tehran for her refusal to wear the veil. For two years, before she emigrated to the United States in 1997, Nafisi taught an underground class for women. Along the way, Nafisi discovered how a totalitarian regime makes its subjects feel unreal and “fictional.”
In her close, passionate readings, the ayatollahs are compared to Humbert Humbert, who forced Dolores Haze to become his fantasy. The Islamists’ obsessive repudiation of America reminded Nafisi of Elizabeth Bennet’s determination to find fault with Darcy. These passages–and a bravura section recounting how her class put “The Great Gatsby” on trial–teach as much about the works Nafisi loves as about the country she left.
Today, countless Iranian students are joining in Nafisi’s fight for the right to a private life. Humans are the product of a tension: We share a human nature, and therefore a natural moral law. If we did not, how could we condemn the ayatollahs, or champion Lolita over her rapist? But we are also individuals with our own peculiar and private dreams. A society that forgets either half of this tension will soon sink into brutality.
–Eve Tushnet
