Roxanne Varzi writes:

Certainly you shouldn’t overlook what Gillian Whitlock, in Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, calls the paratext: the liminal features that surround the text, not just the book’s jacket and typeface but interviews with the author, reviews and commentaries. It is in transit, as commodities, that these narratives, which Whitlock calls ‘veiled memoirs’, are shaped by and for the public. Whitlock reproduces an Audi ad that shows Nafisi, outfitted in a cream suit, floating among shelves of books in a library (a library that contains no contemporary Iranian literature) above the words: ‘Never let reality get in the way of imagination.’ She is presented as the embodiment of imagination, and yet the ‘reality’ of contemporary Iran, which she claims to reveal to her audiences, is what provides her cultural capital.

(LRB 31 July 2008)

Chicago | paperback 216 pp. |ISBN: 9780226895260