new book – ‘The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness’
Written on May 29, 2011
Thanks to 3quarksdaily for pointing me to this title via the Guardian interview with the author: The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness by Lila Azam Zanganeh (W.W. Norton & Co., 2011)
Product description from the publisher:
Discovering happiness in reading the work of an extraordinary writer.
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
See also: Author’s website
