Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Enchanter Nabokov and Happiness by Lila Azam Zanganeh The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness by Lila Azam Zanganeh: review. The author of Lolita is easy to admire, says Nicholas Shakespeare, but The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness by Lila Azam Zanganeh is an obsessive homage too full of quivers and quavers. Writers, generally, are an unappetising lot – just as most actors are boring; how can you not be when you expend your talent trying to be someone else? Novelists, and poets especially, put their best feet forward in print, ploughing their sensitivities into their books. Off page, they tend to be – and I include myself – envious, vain, money-obsessed, self-obsessed, badly dressed, maudlin, touchy, hypocritical et cetera. You only have to look at the conduct of authors in Occupied France to see how biddable they were, how porous their values. Jean Guéhenno, an essayist who refused to publish a word until the Germans left Paris, wrote in his diary: “The species of the man of letters is not one of the greatest of human species. He would sell his soul to see his name in print. “It goes without saying that he is full of good reasons. French literature must continue. He believes that he is French literature and thought, and that they will die without him.” The record of Sartre, Cocteau, even Camus is not impressive in this respect. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, one such being Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita , Speak, Memory and Ada or Ardor , who in 1940 managed to flee Paris for America. A man of great integrity, Nabokov, by all accounts, was also an enchanter; according to his son Dmitri, he led a life “whose every detail gave him joy”. Certainly, he has enchanted Lila Azam Zanganeh, a former teacher at Harvard “in literature, cinema and romance languages”. Her homage to him, which comes garlanded with humid puffs from Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, is the record of her long-distance love affair with a writer who died when she was 10 months old (in July 1977). Unfortunately, the spell that Nabokov has cast on her has brought to the surface her own insufficiencies. Once, while waiting to interview Julio Iglesias, I met a beaming Japanese woman who had attended the singer’s every concert for the previous five years – a condition sorrowfully described by Iglesias’s assistant as “Julitis”. Zanganeh suffers from much the same affliction. She used to dread reading books, she writes, until she was wrenched into her present state of ecstasy by the first paragraph of Ada . She was felled by Nabokov’s singular way “of netting the light particles tingling around us”. She writes: “Even in darkness, Nabokov tells us, things quiver with lambent beauty.” Her book on Nabokov is written in this sensitive vein. Everything quivers, or quavers. The silence in a park. Time. A shadow. Her prose is both hyperbolic and poetically imprecise, its currents running in multiple directions. She describes Speak, Memory as a “startling lens” through which her fixed ideas were “slowly turned on their heads”. In this heightened state, she visits both the writer’s grave and his son, conducts an imaginary interview with Nabokov and fantasises about butterfly hunting. Of more concern is the way in which, like Natalie Portman in Black Swan , she metamorphoses into her subject. “Very slowly, obsessionally, like a throbbing melody jumbled in a dream, V N’s words keep whirling round and round my head.” This takeover has a chloroforming effect. Take the following sentence, which should be anthologised: “Time’s pale fire now wheeled the weight of the world, shedding light on the discreteness of things, cracking open the dormer window of consciousness.” At times, Nabokov’s baleful influence is reminiscent of that of Conrad on the early (and suppressed) works of Graham Greene, another exile buried in Switzerland. Nabokov, apparently, thought absolutely nothing of “lady writers”. Zanganeh writes hopefully: “What he might have thought of a perilously Nabokovian would-be writer of the female gender, I shudder to imagine.” She will not be alone. At heart, there is something untrustworthy about The Enchanter . One cannot help but feel that she is accidentally-on-purpose playing at being Lolita, a literary nymphet with a crush on Nabokov. Like Lolita, she parades her adolescence with cute drawings, maps of happiness and chapter headings such as “Where the Writer Recaptures Time and the Reader Pulls Out a Mirror”. Like Lolita, she is precocious, with ready quotes from Thomas Hobbes. But where Lolita is a cliché who seduces (“at 6.15 in the morning, to be precise, at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel”), here the author’s excess of self-consciousness is cloying. Striving for a wisdom and a charm she has yet to earn, she remains in Humbert Humbert’s lethal phrase, “‘a college girl’ – that horror of horrors”. * Nicholas Shakespeare’s latest novel is Inheritance (Harvil Secker) The Enchanter. 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. ISBN 13: 9780393079920. The protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift playfully dreamed of writing "A Practical Handbook: How to Be Happy." Now, Nabokov's own creative reader Lila Azam Zanganeh lends life to this vision with sly sophistication and ebullient charm, as she shares the delirious joy to be found in reading the masterpieces of "the great writer of happiness." Plunging into the enchanted and luminous worlds of Speak, Memory; Ada, or Ardor ; and the infamous Lolita , Azam Zanganeh seeks out the Nabokovian experience of time, memory, sexual passion, nature, loss, love in all its forms, and language in all its allusions. She explores Nabokov's geography-from his Russian childhood to 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 beautifully illuminated book will both reignite the passion of experienced Nabokovians and lure the innocent reader to a well of delights as yet unseen. 12 black-and-white illustrations. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Lila Azam Zanganeh was born in Paris. She has taught literature, cinema, and Romance languages at Harvard University. She now writes and lives mainly in New York City. The author at times brilliantly captures Nabokov's calculated whimsy. The recountings of conversations with Dmitri, for example, are both lovely and informative. There are moments of real beauty here. " Vaguely Borgesian. >Lila Azam Zanganeh, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness. One cobalt-blue morning of butterfly hunting, in August 1971, after climbing a Swiss mountain, looking tanned and serene, net in hand, Vladimir Nabokov told his son Dmitri he had fulfilled all he ever dreamed and was a supremely happy man. It is on this mountainous peak that I like to imagine him, VN, exclaiming like his elated creature Van Veen: “I, Vladimir Nabokov, salute you, life!” (p. 1) Too often biographies can be staid, prosaic affairs. The subject (yes, a “subject” rather than anything resembling a fascinating human being) is prodded, poked, and pinned to the narrative board in a fashion similar to the butterflies that acclaimed Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov used to hunt in his own pursuit of happiness. Those dull, listless non-fictions do little to promote interest in the “whys” of the biographed’s importance, instead settling for rote “hows” that can drain the reader of interest in the person supposedly being immortalized. Readers, especially those seeking to know more about creative geniuses, frequently are left wanting. However, there do occasionally appear biographies that manage to capture that elusive élan in which the original composers crafted their masterpieces. Last year, Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne, How to Live , was much more than a recapitulation of that famed essayist’s essays on various parts and motivations of life. She made Montaigne live again in those pages and that in turn spurred me to read his Essays in translation. Another biographer takes a different tack to covering her subject. Iranian-French writer/professor Lila Azam Zanganeh in her first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness , tackles her love for Nabokov’s writing and the sense of profound happiness (although other adjectives might come closer to describing the complex array of emotions he evoked in his writings and in his life) that he expressed in his fiction and life. Perhaps “biography” is not the most apt word for Zanganeh’s book: it is in turns an exploration of Nabokov’s life, Zanganeh’s introduction (told in three distinct fashions; one or more of which might be “imagined” rather than “real”) to Nabokov’s fiction, an “interview” with the dead author, and a quasi-love letter from an older Lolita to a more demure Humbert. For some, Zanganeh’s approach might be too flippant and light on profundity. But for others, including myself, Zanganeh’s inventive approach toward biography was refreshing. She obviously has a great respect for Nabokov, but it is tempered with some reserve, most notably when discussing Nabokov’s (or VN, as she often refers to him) relations with his wife Véra and with women writers in general. She does not cover his life from birth to death, with the usual itinerary of important authorial milestones. Instead, she explores Nabokovian concepts of happiness in thematic chapters that vary from the academic to the intensely personal: This passage is representative of Zanganeh’s approach toward covering Nabokov. The personal nature of this musing can be captivating, but there are also times where it feels self-indulgent in its digressions. Yet the overall effect does not detract from the book. Rather, it provides The Enchanter with a charming quality in which its occasional lapses into sloppiness and diversion ultimately add to a sense of the admirable qualities of the biographical subject and, even more importantly, his literary creations. This alone makes The Enchanter a wonderful reading experience; it is an added bonus that it also has left me wanting to re-read Nabokov’s writing. What more could be asked from a biography of a famous author? The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness by Lila Azam Zanganeh – review. I n The Enchanter , Lila Azam Zanganeh attempts to create a new genre: the Bildungs-romance. The book details its author's love affair with Nabokov, and tells how she learned to read books from his novels, using them as doorways to magical worlds. Rather than attempt conventional biography or literary criticism, she portrays a series of encounters with moments from Nabokov's biography – his last months in Switzerland, his childhood in Russia, his early love affairs. She invents an interview with "VN" about his years in the USA, and provides a whimsical anti-glossary for some of his flamboyantly obscure vocabulary. All of this is interwoven with Zanganeh's responses to Nabokov's writing, particularly Ada , but also Lolita and Laura , with the theme of happiness always central. By this, Zanganeh explains, she does not mean "platitudinous happy characters", but "deep joyousness", "bliss", or "ecstasy". This is a feeling "connected to the edge, an experience of limits (in its quasi-mathematical sense of an open-end), which in turn becomes one of extreme poetry". The book strives to recreate the "unearthly inebriation" of reading Nabokov, at times by direct quotation, at times by imitation of his style – as when Zanganeh describes Speak, Memory as "no hollow monument to the past, no search into its designs, unseen at first sight, yet stippled, ever so lightly, in the texture of time". Somewhere between reverence and reverie, both eloquent and gauche, the tone is completely different from such outwardly comparable subjective and wayward descriptions of encounters with writers and writing as Andrei Siniavsky's Strolls with Pushkin or Elif Batuman's The Possessed . Where Siniavsky and Batuman maintain a certain stubborn and wry sense of self-possession in the face of classic writers, Zanganeh seeks to efface her own personality. Hinting at parallels in her own biography to Nabokov's (not writing in one's childhood language, coming from a refugee background), she does not develop these, preferring to bob along in the master's wake. Ornamented with charmingly naïve drawings by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, and preceded by a hand-sketched "happiness itinerary", The Enchanter at times recaptures that period of childhood when a join-up-the-dots picture really did seem to promise a thrilling quest. Mainly dwelling on the luminescence and colour-saturation of Nabokov's prose, Zanganeh has a feeling for his ludic side too. A sketch of her fumbling attempts, after a childhood shorn of contact even with cows, to net a cabbage white while walking in the groomed wilderness of a national park, brings Pnin irresistibly to mind. Though some aspects of The Enchanter are achingly arch (for example, the rambling subtitles to chapters, or a vision of the reader training a telescope on Zanganeh's brown-eyed self), there are hints that the author is sharper-witted than her narratorial pose would often suggest. The "first encounter" with Nabokov's writing is described three times, on each occasion differently. In the opening pages, Ada converts a prone and listless Zanganeh to reading when she is living in the USA. Later, she describes how her mother's teasing references to the novel provoked her to acquire a copy, "in translation", during her childhood. And then again, Ada becomes the second novel by Nabokov that she encountered during her romance with the writer. As Zanganeh puts it elsewhere, "I am lying a little". In some respects, the book takes risks. Zanganeh is aware of Nabokov's implacably ironic attitude to "lady writers". She surely recalls the passage in a letter where he says that even the best women novelists made him think of someone lounging on a sofa with a self-satisfied smile. Yet she begins her book with an image of herself on a "plump couch" – an attempt, no doubt, to play on and neutralise the image. When Zanganeh follows two pages accurately describing Nabokov's detestation of the most harmless speculation about his married life with a sketch of how VN might have entered his wife's room in Montreux to find her "lying naked, supine, gray-blue eyes lifted skywards", one may assume that a point about the necessary indecency of a writer's voyeurism, as opposed to a journalist's or biographer's, is being made. Yet Zanganeh's relationship with Nabokov, however carefully calculated, remains on occasions less happy than haphazard. Passages read less like the work of "VN" himself than like editor Brian Boyd's life-and-works resculpted in fondant icing. "One cobalt-blue morning of butterfly hunting, in August 1971, after climbing a Swiss mountain, looking tanned and serene, net in hand, Vladimir Nabokov told his son Dmitri he had fulfilled all he ever dreamed and was a supremely happy man." As a writer, Zanganeh entirely lacks Nabokov's genial pedantry. She can be imprecise, even sloppy. "A sea of gravestones is sprawling before me [. . .] The sun-washed graves shine noiselessly in the cool of this early September morning." Referring to "the round apricot of a glistening mouth" sounds impressive – if you have never looked carefully at an apricot. At times, Zanganeh achieves not so much ventriloquism in the occultic sense as the distorted imitation of speech of a music-hall dummy. All the same, The Enchanter has some resemblance, in places, to a genuine book – an artist's book, even, though one turned out by the machine of international publishing. Readers who already know Nabokov will have the delight of recognition – and not always when the writer himself is being quoted. Others will happily follow Zanganeh down the seductive paths of the maze that she has created. As for the minority who may find that the repeated image in The Enchanter that stays with them is the one of someone "screaming quietly", then some of them would probably have been Nabokov-haters to begin with. Catriona Kelly's Children's World: Growing Up in Russia is published by Yale.