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[Azam Zanganeh continues...] those are based entirely on stories that I've been told. Father looking at a mosquito bite at dusk, or being woken by something, the wind or a ghost, at night. Very mundane things. But I feel like that's really just part one of Nabokov's idea. It's that sensual awakening, the fact that we're all sharing in this strange medium that appears to set things into motion. But then, as I mentioned, his core idea on time in the end—he says it in Speak, Memory, too—is that time does not exist.

JL: So he's talking about that moment as the kick-starting of time—and then, through art, the stopping of it...

LAZ: Well, art allows, to begin with, for a heightened consciousness of time, realizing that we think of time as moving, stopping and going, he says, like stations. I talk about it in Chapter 7, which has always been one of my favorite chapters in the book. It's largely based on Ada and the notion of time that blossoms there. But on a deeper level, Nabokov says that it's a mistake to think of time as flowing because the artist, or the hyperconscious—when I say artist, I like to think of dreaming as a form of art as well—

JL: The artist of consciousness—

LAZ: Yes, exactly... The acute dreamer is an artist as well. So the artist of consciousness is able to fold and mold and play with time, and therefore negate the very existence of it. What little I know of Einstein seems to point to some convergence between Einstein's idea of time and Nabokov's. And that does seem deeply exciting to me. Because I believe that great poets and artists have genuine, ancient, metaphysical as well as physical insights. I love thinking about this.

I remember interviewing a scientist ages ago whom I thought very charming until he told me that he never read fiction. He found it boring because the real world is so much more interesting, he said. And I thought to myself, you can research your science for another two thousand years and the things that slowly you'll come to realize in your field have been intuited thousands of years ago by poets. Those two things are not diverging. It sounded completely stupid to me to say that fiction is uninteresting because the real world is so much more interesting.

JL: The book is called The Enchanter, which, of course, has the ring of delight to it—enchantment. But also "enchanter" in the sense of conjurer. And there's also a hint of the seducer, I think, in the word "enchanter." Some people who are wary of Nabokov—those who are not completely sold on him, and there are more than a few of them—refer to him as a sort of seducer in language, with a negative connotation. The seducer is not to be trusted. Do you ultimately trust Nabokov? The passion you have for his work—is it an enchantment behind which there is a deep trust?

LAZ: That is such a funny question, and to me so peculiarly formulated, but I do understand what you mean. Yes, I trust him deeply. I think, to me, the question of trust is a very "American" one, quote-unquote. Because I think—and I don't mean this as a barb against you—I think Americans, culturally, are very hung up on what truth is, or what fact is. I don't much care for fact and neither did Nabokov. I think that, for instance, some prim and proper detectives who've wanted to investigate the lives of the Nabokovs—I'm not talking about Brian Boyd, whom I like very much both as a scholar and a person—are always looking to unmask Nabokov and say, "Oh, he said he met his wife there like this and he lied; they said this and they're both making it up." They are all looking for facts through fact-checking lenses and they're annoyed that Nabokov would dare make things up.

But of course, all artists are making things up all day long. And that's their only reality. I deeply trust Nabokov because we both trust in the same thing—because we both know, believe, and live feeling that imagination is what he would call reality to the X degree. Nothing is more intense, more alive, more real than what is imagined. It's the quintessence of the human experience and, of course, if I didn't trust in that, I would be clinically depressed. If life were a bookcase, a desk, a chicken sandwich, and occasionally a trip on an airplane, that would reduce the universe to a little ball. But imagination is what gives us the full measure of who we are. And therefore, I trust fully in those imaginary worlds, in what in Ada is called "Antiterra." It's the artistic planet. But in its purest, most literal sense, so that it cannot be entrusted only to the man or woman who constructs art or who understands difficult works—it should also be entrusted to the mere dreamer.

There is a film by Pasolini I like very much, The Decameron, the first film of a trilogy he called The Trilogy of Life. In The Decameron, Pasolini himself plays Giotto, one of the greatest painters of all time. Giotto creates a work of art in the film, and the Virgin Mary and all the people inside the church painting in the end are actual human beings, they form a tableau vivant. And then, in the last line of the film, Giotto mumbles, "But why create a work of art when it's even more beautiful just to dream it?" It's such a beautiful sentence, a genuine profession of faith. He means that anyone is capable of it, of awakening to the infinite possibilities of the imagination. We all do it every night, and each time we raise our nose and begin to daydream.

JL: I want to go back to something you said earlier about patterning. I was going to ask you about coincidences, because I noticed this early on when we met: you seem particularly attuned to coincidence. I mean that you notice it and openly celebrate it more than most people I know. Is this also something else you feel you share with Nabokov—a sort of aliveness to coincidences?

LAZ: Yes, that's part of the patterning which Nabokov talks about. He has a wonderful sentence in Ada that says that there should be a law of probability according to which, past a certain number of coincidences, the coincidence is no longer a coincidence but the living organism of a new truth. In Lolita, Humbert talks about the coincidences "that logicians loath and poets love." And it's really just that. It's love. You're inventing

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