Lila Azam Zanganeh: “A writer is always rewriting another writer”

(Versión en español)

Desire, transgression, light. Nabokov. To keep a conversation with Lila Azam Zanganeh (Paris, 1976) causes genuine intellectual vertigo. This writer, born in Paris from Iranian parents, lives and works in New York and combines the creation of her literary works –The Enchanter was the first one, an unclassifiable literary artifact about her relationship with Nabokov– with collaborations for Le Monde, The Paris Review, The New York Times or La Repubblica. Among many other merits, she is the only woman at the Nabokov Literary Foundation and is a member of the Man Booker prize jury.

Busy with many travels and the completion of her second book, a rewriting of The song of Roland, we seize her stopover in Barcelona returning from Majorca, where she has taken part at Converses literàries a Formentor, to talk with her about literature, writing, reading and Nabokov; a writer that she reads and rereads obsessively. She says that she loves literature just as much she dreads reading. And that is where the game begins.

How were your days in Majorca at the Converses literàries a Formentor?

They were completely marvelous. I was very surprised both by the way the festival was organized and the place itself, which was of incredible beauty. I have always had a special relationship to Spain; I always feel like I’m back home in a way, I felt incredibly happy.

You gave a talk about The Golden Ass (Lucius Apuleius). What was it about?

I was educated in France, and over there you always have to answer questions by asking why, how… The theme was “Spirits, ghosts and lost souls”, so I was wondering what the why to this question was and what the connector was. I realized that maybe it was a question related to desire because part of the reason why these lost souls would come back was the desire to continue living, to continue something that was unfinished. So it struck that the connection between The Golden Ass and that question was a notion of transgression. And to me, of course, it is all connected to the work I am finishing now, it’s the very link that Apuleius makes between transgressions as a means to start a narrative. Any kind of transgression that occurs within the story: he wants to become an owl and puts an ointment but instead of becoming an owl, the ointment is the wrong one and he becomes an ass. One of the principles of these ancient Roman religions was that you should not meddle with the invisible. So the first transgression is that Lucius is extremely interested in becoming a wizard, meddling in magic. More than a wizard it’s a sorcerer, really. The second transgression is that he gets the ritual wrong. That begins the story. And then, much of the story is about desire, and desire itself is always a transgression, it’s a question without an answer, it’s about going against something. And of course there are ghost stories proper within the narrative. To summarize it, the story is about Lucius finding the goddess Isis, but in order to reach Isis he has to go through these transgressions, meet a few ghosts, find many adulterous men and women and finally get to spiritual elevation. For me it was a beautiful occasion to re-read the text with that lens. And of course so much of the playfulness is connected to these two themes. For me of course it’s much more than the theme of the “Converses”, it’s what always has interested me most in literature: the connection between transgression and desire, which are both related to literature. And it’s literature as a form of desire, the desire for literature and the desire that makes literature.