THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Remembering Patsy by Brian Mansfield (Rutledge Hill, 95 pp., $14.99). Everybody likes Patsy Cline. Most of ±e popular country singers of the 1950s and 1960s have...
...Humans are the product of a tension: We share a human nature, and therefore a natural moral law...
...For two years, before she emigrated to the United States in 1997, Nafisi taught an underground class for women...
...She had a good soul and a good heart...
...Here, one thinks, is a woman one would like to know...
...But here her face shows both intelligence and determination...
...I respected her," notes singer Jim Ed Brown, "because she was what she was...
...If we did not, how could we condemn the ayatollahs, or champion Lolita over her rapist...
...Eve Tushnet...
...Today, countless Iranian students are joining in Nafisi's fight for the right to a private life...
...But though Patsy Cline died forty years ago, her Greatest Hits Collection still sells millions of copies each year...
...The Islamists' obsessive repudiation of America reminded Nafisi of Elizabeth Bennet's determination to find fault with Darcy...
...Cline rose to stardom because, in addition to being talented, she was sassy and self-assured—"road-wise," as Willie Nelson described her...
...In her close, passionate readings, the ayatollahs are compared to Humbert Humbert, who forced Dolores Haze to become his fantasy...
...But Azar Nafisi, in her evocative autobiography Reading Lolita in Tehran, documents the subtler brutality in the regime's control over daily life...
...Mansfield's little book features about forty photos of Cline posing, performing, chatting amicably with other country stars...
...She was no diva, but a woman who brought her checkbook to recording sessions and, during the delays, paid her bills...
...And then she died, at thirty, in an airplane crash...
...Like many country singers, Cline grew up poor and sang gospel as a girl...
...In this totalitarian state, Nafisi taught the novel—a genre renowned for its attention to private life...
...Brian Murray Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (Random House, 368 pp., $23.95...
...Remembering Patsy also includes anecdotes that confirm this view...
...The singer and composer Roger Miller also recalls that Cline "loved to laugh...
...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...
...Along the way, Nafisi discovered how a totalitarian regime makes its subjects feel unreal and "fictional...
...There were no airs to Patsy"—a quality her records can't conceal...
...Or Faron Young...
...Deviations were punished with whips, jails, and humiliating searches...
...Her voice was both tender and big...
...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...
...She was a really good person, a person you wanted to have in your corner...
...Who listens to Minnie Pearl anymore...
...And who could ask for a better tribute than that...
...Her story—popularized in the 1985 film, Sweet Dreams—is both dramatic and sad...
...In nearly all the other pictures, Cline smiles widely...
...Most of ±e popular country singers of the 1950s and 1960s have disappeared, known only to country music devotees...
...Everything was regulated, from how women should laugh to how men should wear their shirts...
...But we are also individuals with our own peculiar and private dreams...
...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...
...A society that forgets either half of this tension will soon sink into brutality...
...The 1979 Iranian Revolution produced such obvious brutalities as men lashed for planning parties and female prisoners "married" to their guards, raped, and executed...
...It's a singular face, broad and a bit tough, but sensuous and honest, too...
...Her "lively eyes," writes Brian Mansfield in Remembering Patsy, "haunt us from black-and-white photographs...
...Most of these are generic publicity shots, but one—of Cline standing before a radio station microphone—shows something more...
...She was eventually barred from the University of Tehran for her refusal to wear the veil...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 38
