Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice. As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan. I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet. After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview . So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not. Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot. These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
Don't be one of those readers either.
ReplyDeleteI know readers who won't read Dostoyevsky because Nabokov didn't like him.
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely! In fact it might be generalized--don't be one of those readers/writers who spends your life sucking up to ANYONE.
And I'm about to betray my total philistinism here--I just don't see that Nabokov is "all that." I can't think of a single thing he's written that I've actually enjoyed. _Lolita_ horrifies me from the get-go--I don't like to spend time in the company of monsters, _Ada_ likewise--I've tried Bend Sinister, Pnin, Speak, Memory, and what seems like countless others and all I can figure is that Nabokov had such a high opinion of himself that he managed to impress others with it.
Perhaps, just as with James and Conrad, his time will come in my reading life--but I'm so put off by the persona that I somewhat doubt it.
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDeleteYes! I used to like Nabokov, quite a bit. And wasn't even put off by Lolita, because I was too caught up in the Joycean wordplay to be offended by the subject matter. But then I read a collection of essays/interviews called Strong Opinions. Off-putting in the extreme.
At any rate, love the quotation.
Steven - Nabokov was one of my earliest literary discoveries. All the books you mention and many more are touchstones for me. Over the years though I have learnt to divorce the writer, his opinions and his works. The man became insufferable, what the Americans accurately call a blowhard (I love the term and it can be so apt).
ReplyDeleteSteven,
ReplyDeleteI've also read a number of Nabokov's works. I find them technically good, but something is missing--humanity.
My impression is that Nabokov is sitting on high and laughing derisively at his characters. I get the feeling he doesn't like them any more than a young child likes the flies whose wings it is pulling off.
His characters are cloth and wood puppets whom he plays with for awhile and then dumps in a box when he's bored with them. I think that's why he doesn't like Dostoyevsky whose humanity is obvious. I get the feeling that Dostoyevsky cared even about his villains whereas Nabokov cared for no one.
Dear Anthony,
ReplyDeletePerhaps you can recommed something that isn't quite so objectionable from point of view of subject matter--some placed where I can get a feel for the language without having sensibilities trampled. I'll admit to some fairly strong constraints around my reading, and I would like to appreciate Nabokov, but honestly, even despite the subject matter (take innocuous subjects such as the essays on literature), I tend to be bored by his own obsession with his virtuosity. On the other hand, it is one of my great delights to have been wrong and to discover the wonders of writers whom I've dismissed over the years. It is kind of happening with Philip
Roth--though I'm still uncertain there.
So, suggestions would be welcome. Perhaps _Pale Fire_.
Fred,
Your impression correspond with my own. And as Anthony pointed out, he did tend to be a bit full of himself and obnoxious as a persona (I won't say as a person, because I'm not certain that we ever saw behind the public mask he put out for general consumption. He might have behaved just as poorly in private, but frankly, I'm not sure I care to find out.)
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDelete_Pale Fire_ would be a good one to try.
I thought it was a satire or parody of lit crit, but I was informed otherwise by various faculty while I was in grad school.
Steven,
ReplyDeleteI have no impression of Nabokov as a person, aside from what seeped through from his writings.
I gained the vague idea, which I discounted, of a cold, distant person. But, that was based on his authorial persona, which may be quite other than what he might be in person.
Steven - Pale Fire is wonderful but if Ada or Speak, Memory failed to win you to Nabokov, it may not do the trick. Perhaps The Luzhin Defense which contains, i think, fewer autobiographical elements.
ReplyDelete