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the complete review - literature / biography

The Enchanter

by
Lila Azam Zanganeh

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : creative take on Nabokov and his work, ultimately quite winning

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "On this point, however, her book is unsatisfying. She omits explicit references to her own back-story, perhaps out of a reasonable desire to avoid comparisons with that other Nabokov-themed memoir by an Iranian expatriate, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Yet her reluctance to explore the connections makes her appear coy, even cagey. (...) So at one does Zanganeh feel with Nabokov that the book’s final chapter simply stitches quotes from the old master’s works into her own dream-like text. It’s an amusing conceit, well executed, but perhaps sheds more light on her opinion of her own writing than on her subject." - Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times
  
  
• "Though some aspects of The Enchanter are achingly arch (...), there are hints that the author is sharper-witted than her narratorial pose would often suggest. (...) In some respects, the book takes risks. (...) Yet Zanganeh's relationship with Nabokov, however carefully calculated, remains on occasions less happy than haphazard. (...) As a writer, Zanganeh entirely lacks Nabokov's genial pedantry. She can be imprecise, even sloppy. (...) 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." - Catriona Kelly, The Guardian
  
  
• "In this adventuring spirit, the author leads us through the work and life of her favorite author, who died when she was just 10 months old. It is a contagion of happiness, a landscape of luminous discovery. Facts, words, characters, style, invention -- she writes in flashes, like a camera lens opening and closing." - Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "As a way of saying something meaningful about another writer, however, creative reading largely does not succeed. The Enchanter may make you want to read Nabokov, but it lacks insight into him." - James Camp, The New York Observer
  
  
• "(I)f the intention is to send the reader back to the works of Vladimir Nabokov with newly polished eyes and an eager appetite, it succeeds without question. But it is more than a literary springboard from which to launch oneself back to the classics: it is a thing of beauty in its own right. (...) Her own prose is just as limpid and bevelled as the work of the Enchanter himself." - Stuart Kelly, Scotland On Sunday
  
  
• "Her book on Nabokov is written in this sensitive vein. Everything quivers, or quavers. (...) (T)he 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, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Zanganeh's book belongs to a genre that might best be glossed as reader's memoir, such as Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage and Nicholson Baker's U and I (.....) She lacks the wry self-deprecation of Dyer or Baker, and the joy she finds in emulating Nabokov's writing is not at all times shared by the reader." - Ivan Juritz, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "(S)he misses the core. What Nabokov valued, perhaps above all else, was what he could preserve in memory and save from oblivion." - Alexander Theroux, Wall Street Journal

  Quotes:

• "To the average reader, though -- even the most enthusiastic and bookish among us -- The Enchanted has a lot of the same problems as Nabokov's work. Beautiful though many of its stories are, it's hard to avoid the creeping sensation that it is all, well, a bit up itself." - Viv Groskop, Independent on Sunday (29/5/2011)

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       In The Enchanter Lila Azam Zanganeh takes a creative approach to reading and reflecting on the works of Vladimir Nabokov, and on the author. Despite an opening sentence that claims and warns, "I have always dreaded reading and books", Azam Zanganeh has certainly immersed herself in the books she discusses here. Concentrating here on Lolita, Ada, and Speak, Memory, she delves into and revels in Nabokov's world(s) with abandon. "We read to reenchant the world", and that is what she tries to convey here, focusing on Nabokov's own joy in his creative work.
       The Enchanter offers everything from re-tellings of Lolita and Ada to the flights of fancy the novels engender. Azam Zanganeh accounts for much of Nabokov's life (leaning heavily and quoting extensively from Brian Boyd's two-volume biography), but also spins her own fantasies: she notes at the opening that she was a mere ten months when Nabokov died, yet also presents what she claims is an interview (but, of course, can't be) she conducted with Nabokov some ten months after he completed Ada (photograph included -- 'VN and me by Lake Como' --, and Nabokov convincingly described peeking "at an index card deftly concealed in Dante"). Elsewhere she write of actual encounters with Nabokov fils, Dmitri (who has generously played along with the entire endeavor, allowing also extensive Nabokovian quotes as well as providing a blurb ...).
       Describing Nabokov's art, as well as her own, Azam Zanganeh writes:

     It's as much a matter of remembering and connecting, as it is of inventing, at times. Thus from composites I recomposed.

     Great literature, in his eyes, was a feat of language, not ideas. And even then, he did not believe in a grand literary art, only in starkly original artists (such as Shakespeare, Pushkin, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, and himself). So that, in the end, a writer's true biography should amount to no more than the story of his style.

     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.

     Overcome by a sense of rapture, keen to partake in the bounteous delights of nature, I shed my bag and shoes and socks et altri, racing barefoot, skipping among purple heliotropes and burnberry bushes, net ablaze, light lozenges of shade gliding over my naked back.

- M.A.Orthofer, 12 April 2011

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Links:

• W.W.Norton publicity page
• Allen Lane publicity page
• Profile in The Guardian
• Profile at The New York Times Magazine's weblog

• Boston Globe
• Electric Lit
• Financial Times
• For Books' Sake
• The Guardian
• Kirkus Reviews
• The Literateur
• The Los Angeles Times
• Newcity Lit
• The New York Observer
• The New Yorker
• The OF Blog
• The Telegraph

• Vladimir Nabokov at books and writers
• The fine Zembla site, devoted to Nabokov.

• Official site

• Lolita
• Lolita: A Screenplay
• Nabokov's Butterflies
• [The Original of Laura]
• Think, Write, Speak

• My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes (ed.)

• Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by Robert Golla
• Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov
• Azar Nafisi on Reading Lolita in Tehran
• See Index of Books on Books and Publishing, and Bibliographies
• See Index of Literary Essays
• See Index of Biographical works under review

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About the Author:

       Lila Azam Zanganeh was born in Paris in 1976.

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© 2011-2021 the complete review

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