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• Extract
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• Interview

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• More titles by Lila Azam Zanganeh

Synopsis

With sly sophistication and ebullient charm, Lila Azam Zanganeh shares the intoxication of delirious joy to be found in reading-in particular, in reading the masterpieces of "the great writer of happiness," Vladimir Nabokov.

Plunging into the enchanted and luminous worlds of Speak, Memory; Ada, or Ardor; and the infamous Lolita, Zanganeh seeks out the Nabokovian experience of time, memory, sexual passion, nature, loss, love in all its forms, language in all its allusions. She explores his geography-his Russian childhood, his European sojourns, the landscapes of "his" America-suffers encounters with his beloved "nature," hallucinates an interview with the master, and seeks the "crunch of happiness" in his singular vocabulary. This rhapsodic and beautifully illuminated book will both reignite the passion of experienced lovers of Nabokov's work, and lure the innocent reader to a well of delights.

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Reviews

Interview

Why did you choose to write about Nabokov? Or do you feel that Nabokov chose you?

I fell in love with Nabokov. With the light that radiates from his books. But also with the man himself, and his life. He was forced to leave Russia and flee the Bolsheviks in 1919, at 20, then again, he fled France and the Nazis in 1940, at 41 (his wife, Véra, was Jewish). His father was assassinated in Berlin in 1922. Yet he was able to collect himself and write himself into (last three words in ital. please) happiness. My own family was exiled from Iran. And my uncle was executed in 1979, in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, on the roof of a primary school in Tehran. He was half-Russian, half-Iranian. His death and the trevolution changed the course of all our lives forever. And I became fascinated by the capability to reinvent oneself. In large part, this is what The Enchanter is about, its secret undercurrent.

Where did your inspiration come from for such a genre-busting mixture of memoir, fiction and literary criticism?

I reveled in the blank page. I wanted the book to be as playful and whimsical as possible. I also knew Nabokov hated didactic works. So I wanted to go about showing that he is the great writer of happiness while simply doing away with disquisitions. Then the writing process took me by surprise. The surprise was how much joy it gave me. Writers often feel that the writing process is torture. I suppose I am also inspired in this by Nabokov. He was that rare bird: a happy writer. He was not only very happy in his private life, he adored his craft, as much as he reveled in butterfly hunting. So his happiness became contagious in a sense. Because what he teaches us is a singular way of looking at the world. And this is the leitmotiv of The Enchanter. Each chapter is one idea of happiness according to Nabokov, one way of looking: at time, at memory, at love, at nature, at colors, at words, and of course, at light...

Both you and Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, come from Iran. Is there something about Nabokov that particularly appeals to Iranians?

Perhaps there is a Nabokov tropism in the Iranian psyche. It might be connected to several things. Exile is the most obvious one, for Iranians like Azar and me who have been cut off from our homeland. The most pertinent ones I feel are language (many Iranians live straddling several languages, exactly like 19th-century Russians, and the trilingual music of Nabokov sounds very much like home) and imagination (the notion of a "portable home" where "the past is ever-present" - now there's the heart of VN, and ours). There is, most dear to Azar and myself, the central notion of curiosity: "Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form" says VN, and this notion of ravenous curiosity (and all its colors) as intrinsically political in the purest sense is, I believe, what weaves us intimately to Nabokov.

At one stage in your book you ‘interview’ Nabokov. How did it feel to imagine ‘being’ Nabokov when you wrote his responses?

So natural. We know each other rather well by now. Sometimes, for very short sequences of time, I catch myself conversing with him in my everyday life! Well... in earnest, the reason why it felt so natural is that, for several years, I'd been freelancing in New York as an interviewer. My newspaper abroad had run out of funds to send literary correspondents to the US for interviews, so I was left to my own devices, and asked to interview an extraordinary range of writers: John Updike, Gore Vidal, many others. As I listened to the transcipts of my tapes, I realized that writers (even great ones, and we know that this was the case with Nabokov, who was a dreadful public speaker) are often not great speakers. So, avowedly, I began to rewrite. But I had to rewrite true to their voice, their intent, the texture of their speech. When I was done, I always sent it to them for approval. And believe or not, aside from one single writer, no one ever realized they had been entirely rescripted. It was very humorous. So a dear friend of mine started telling me that a quarter of a century from now, we'd likely discover that I had never actually met Updike or Vidal, but had in fact invented everything. Thus when I started writing my book, nothing felt so natural as imagining being Nabokov. In a sense, I had been reinventing writers for years!

Nabokov is perhaps most famous for writing about transgressive relationships, such as paedophilia and incest. Do you think that the happiness and lightness in his work that you write about is overlooked?

Absolutely. The dark plots at times overshadow, in our collective memory of Nabokov, the light that imbues each page of his writing. And this is precisely what The Enchanter explores, so to speak: layer after layer of light... It was the original little throb that led me to write the book. I had written my Master's thesis on Lolita and had read a fair amount of the critical literature. I was struck that most critics and academics seemed intent on proving that Nabokov was indeed a 'moral writer'. That the redemptive virtues of art cleansed Humbert's evil deeds. Something was amiss. They failed to see what seemed obvious to me: that another, hidden dimension lay everywhere woven into the surface of the work. That dimension was light, a way of observing the detail of the world, of recording it, of seeing stupendous patterns everywhere, and embracing that sense of concord with immeasurable bliss. Then, I realized I had to speak to the only person who appeared to have seen it this way: Updike. And when I did speak with him, he gave me his blessing in a sense. He agreed with my idea that this dimension of happiness was essential in VN yet entirely overlooked. He himself, after all, was the writer who had coined this delightful sentence: "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written -- that is, ecstatically." After speaking with Updike, I couldn't wait to start writing the book.

We hear you read your book out loud to Nabokov's son, Dmitri, what was that experience like?

Terrifying, and marvelous. I just wrote an essay about it, called "Reading Nabokov to Nabokov." It was an extraordinarily moving, and revelatory, experience. I knew Dmitri was a very fierce critic of anyone writing on his father. And I had consulted with him before embarking on the adventure. I'd asked him if he agreed that Ada (ital.) was at core a novel of happiness (in the most intricate way, of course, as intricate as all things of real beauty are). And he had agreed. He had no idea how I would set about trying to show it. So the moment I read the finished manuscript to him was the most terrifying of the whole enterprise. The playfulness and creativity seemed madness, all of a sudden, and I was certain Dmitri would hate the work. So that, when he asked me to read the entire book out loud to him, I thought I would never make it through. In the end, the story of that three-day reading felt like a surreal epilogue to The Enchanter.

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