Lila azam zanganeh biography of michael
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As a child of seven or eight, already harbouring the secrets of a confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal) unusually sulky and indolent; actually of course, I kept daydreaming in a most outrageous fashion.
Stop moping! she would cry. Look at the harlequins!
What harlequins? Where?
Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together jokes, images and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!
(Look at the Harlequins Vladimir Nabokov )
I love Nabokovs final novel more and more, and on some days most of all. We now know that it was not meant as a farewell VN was fully immersed in writing a new novel right up until the time of his death but in its reinvented autobiography it has that elegiac feel. It also contains as quoted above one of the most beautiful and evocative descriptions I have ever come across of what precisely it means to be a writer.
I read Lila Azam Zanganehs The Enchanter and was enchanted by it. What I loved was its sincerity, its passion. I didnt mind that occasionally her close and clever pastiching of VNs (in truth) inimitable style left me wishing
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While lots of bright-eyed young women come to New York to take acting classes or become publicists, Lila Azam Zanganeh—an Iranian-French journalist, amateur opera singer and self-described Nabokov scholar—has other plans.
“I remember hearing on the Boston radio, they were discussing the term ‘public intellectual,’” said Ms. Zanganeh, 29, in her precise, plummy English. “Perhaps being a public intellectual is being able to write, but also to be connected to the world. I mean, it sounds almost childish, but I would say that’s really, really my dream. And I hope that I can do it. I don’t have unrealistic expectations.”
Ms. Zanganeh represents a curious phenomenon in the New York literary world: the intellectualite, a person with highbrow aspirations who attends enough parties to make David Patrick Columbia’s head whirl. She turns up everywhere—at the annual P.E.N. gala, TheParis Review’s booze-soaked bacchanals, cocktail gatherings at the New York Public Library and myriad readings and talks, as well as any place where Salman Rushdie and his wife Padma are likely to drop by. And she seems to know everyone that it takes other people 10 years to meet.
“The New York literary world is incredi
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Caress the details
This review of The Enchanter: Writer and Happiness by Lila Azam Zanganeh arrived in depiction Irish Times.
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