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[Azam Zanganeh continues...] all the time. You're inventing meaning. That's what we do.

If you look at a text like The Odyssey, when Telemachus rises to speak for the first time in front of the assembly of all the men of Ithaca, he overcomes his boyishness and expresses deep anger, as he has been advised by Athena to do. Then, suddenly, two hawks swoop down on the audience to indicate the conjoined fury of the gods. That belief system is very much a part of the Greek world. But if you look at our world today, I feel very many human beings continue to function in a similar belief system, although of course it's articulated differently.

If you look at Jung, for instance, he talks about the fact that we can decide that everything science says is true, and do away with everything else as basically false—we can throw away the mythical as something that is not relevant to our true lives, but then we lose what perhaps is the greater part of the human experience. We can decide that the world of Homer is dead and gone. Or we can decide that Homer and any other of the literary geniuses had a vision, possessed a fragment, a splinter of truth that continues to be true today. We can read it metaphorically or we can decide to be a little bolder, more poetic, more mad, if you will, and read more literally into it.

But I do think that many people believe that coincidences wind up making some sort of sense, and that it's really about observing. Life seems to have a sense of humor which manifests in the shape of a given pattern. Nabokov, in The Gift, called it "the reverse side of a magnificent fabric." He believed fiercely that somewhere in the world, above, beneath, around, and about us, there is some form of rhyme and reason. All his short stories, all his novels point to this. In one of his short stories he talks about a pessimist, and says that "like all pessimists, he was a ridiculously unobservant man." It's a strong sentence. It carries such faith in the intimate, hidden, mysterious, and almost mystical fabric of life. And that's something I share with him very much.

JL: You were saying to me earlier how, now that you're working on a novel, you are reading away from Nabokov. Did that come from a very conscious choice? Did you need to enter a different language, a different vocabulary—an anti-Nabokovian world—in order to write a novel?

LAZ: Yes, because this book, The Enchanter, was my first book but also, paradoxically, it was a goodbye to academia. I had studied Nabokov for several years at university. I decided not to do a Ph.D. and to write a book instead, so in a sense I'm tying up loose ends. I wanted to pay tribute to someone who awakened me, intellectually and artistically. But then again, when one decides to grow up, it's always a matter of shedding skin, and I know the language in The Enchanter is inhabited with echoes of Nabokov. In a moment where I'm paying homage, it's humorous, it's playful, there's a strong element of game. In many ways, it's a love letter to his style. And one is infected—it's a contagion of happiness, as one reviewer put it, and the vocabulary begins to shine and shiver in certain tones rather than others. Now, if I am to start a novel of my own, I can't do that anymore. I can no longer be inhabited by so powerful a figure.

So, yes, it's very important to push him aside a little and start reading people who write the English language in beautiful albeit very different ways—and then finding a rudder and direction in my own English as a novelist.

Besides, Nabokov had a very baroque English, wrote in what some may call a flowery English, and I think he can pull it off because he's a man. I believe that under the pen of a woman, some of the more lyrical passages would seem purple. It's awfully tricky to be as baroque when you're a young woman.

JL: Really? Why do you think that is? What makes a baroque style difficult—or is it undesirable?—for a young woman to inhabit?

LAZ: It's immediately perceived as twee, overly lyrical, cloying, too feminine, which means sentimental. It's unfortunate, but we can't read or write and just push away 2,000 years of culture and prejudice. I think some of Nabokov's flights of lyricism, under a woman's signature, would make more than a few of this world's greatest Nabokovians cringe. So, as Sartre has said, I suppose we must try to write against ourselves, poetically speaking, in this case.

JL: Do you read a lot of poetry? You mention in The Enchanter that you're a very slow reader...

LAZ: Yes, I try to read poetry every morning. As to prose, well, I wish I could live a thousand years and read thousands of books as slowly as possible, but we are always reading against time. And we are, of course, extremely and increasingly distracted. I can't believe the extent to which even e-mailing keeps me, on a daily basis, from reading as much as I would like to. So one has to discriminate and decide which books are worth spending a sufficient amount of time on.

The ancient Romans thought it was better to know one book absolutely rather than skim through one thousand. And that one book can be, all of a sudden, transformed into a book of life, where all the roots are connected together and lead to other roots. The French philosopher Deleuze articulated this concept called rhizome, and the rhizomes are specific sorts of roots that exist in nature, they are like interconnected threads weaving an infinitely expanding network of new roots. One little root giving life to another—

JL: —It's the same in English: rhizome. Like bamboo, or aspen.

LAZ: Yes... And I do feel that a perfect work of art like The Odyssey, or even a book like Lolita—well, they hold the world, in that sense, and they are infinitely expanding. I'd rather have ten of those books in me forever than skim through 200,000 stories without getting any closer to that mysterious event—language unfolding.