Dimensions
144 x 222 x 26mm
'Nabokov died on July 2nd 1977. I was ten months old. Roughly four hundred miles separated us. In sum, we had got off to an unfortunate start.'
Despite this disadvantage, Lila Azam Zangeneh has spent a long and pleasurable time getting to know the great writer. She has happily tracked him through books (on the way teaching herself a 'third-rate brand' of Russian), and ultimately found him not just in the enchanted and luminous worlds of Speak, Memory, Ada or Ardor and the infamous Lolita, but filling her life, her imagination and even her dreams.
In The Enchanter she seeks out Nabokov's feeling for memory, sexual passion, nature, loss, love in all its forms and language in all its allusions. She explores his geography – his Russian childhood, his European sojourns, the landscapes of 'his' America – hallucinates an interview with the master, and seeks the 'crunch of happiness' in his singular vocabulary. It will reignite passions for experienced lovers of Nabokov's work and lure the innocent reader to a well of delights.
This is not just an adventure through the unforgettable books of an ecstatic author; it is also a hymn to the pleasures of language and of reading in general, a profound and sweet-hearted guide to the singular, devotional love that can develop between a reader and a writer.
