any stupid take on Nabokov, no matter how crusty, gets me seething
>>24111568well someone filled the wrong square
>>24111576some kid's no no square?
>>24111576first time poaster, sorry my butt's out
>>24111568He was jealous of Dostoevsky
>>24111597wasn't inviting rage for myself, i wanted to know other people's irrational buttonsbut that is not true
>>24111568The fucking "Dante is like a 14th century self insert fanfic duuuudeeeeeee!!!" shit makes me go fucking bananas.
>>24111615se[a]nsei? but fr there's levels to that take
>I’m in favor of fun. Nabokov surfaces a lot of his game, however, and forces the reader, or the assiduous commentator, into paper chases. I don’t think much of that, though I guess the assiduous commentator gets no quarter. Nabokov wants people to follow his private games with the same kind of interest he takes in them himself. Sometimes the intricacies and the little secrets and the codes really work for the reader; things open up and then it is really quite wonderful. Powerful private symbols are related to this. Lowry, for example, was obsessed with certain things. All great writers are. Lowry put down those obsessions on the page, and because they are there, he believes they will have an effect. It is the kind of error the beginning writer makes too—all this stuff that is so important to him never really gets to the page at all.
>>24111568desu I've never understood why people love Nabokov. I get the prose is beautiful but his work never moves me. why do you like him anon
Nabokov is too academic for me. Its funny he dislikes Henry James. They have the same issues
>>24111809what have you read to start? I'll begin by saying he is a writer's writer, just a thought to put into the air. it took me a while to get into him, but at this point, I've read his entire bibliography. i started maturing as a reader and a writer in parallel motion to when i started reading him
>>24111826with maturity, I have come to see and agree with elements of this (though I disagree in the ultimate). there are writers I admire more now, or moreso want to emulate, but Nab was my first love, the first person I wanted to fly a flag for
>>24111844His prode can be great but he is missing a certain spark for me
>>24111835I've read a fair deal>Speak, Memory>Pale Fire>Pnin>The Gift>Lectures on Literaturebut they all seem (Pnin/Speak not so much) like immensely clever yet sterile productions, like intricately tooled machinery that whirs and hovers but lifelessly
>>24111673lol, that is a well executed insult. Gass? Reads like Gass but I can't recall ever hearing him insult anyone.
>>24111892Gass was an excellent reader of Nabokov, not an acolyte but a great thinker of him
>>24111904Lowry as well but that does not mean you can't insult them and have issues with them, and it is not just an insult offered. Pretty sure it is Gass.
People who have obviously never even tried to write poetry talking shit about Shakespeare.
Pretty much everything written on /lit/ makes me seethe, my blood pressure from this site is probably going to kill me.
>>24111892Yeah, Gass. That is actually a followup question, interviewer asked him if he wrote as a way to amuse himself, followup question should be self evident.>Amuse may be the wrong word because it hurts so much, but in essence what you are suggesting is correct. Psychologically these games are necessary. Every writer plays them, though what they are varies a good deal. It is also a protective device which can be dangerous. You may feel that certain things which you have put down on the page are justified because you know how they satisfy your blessed apparatus. That, of course, won’t do. I think for most writers there are little private projects which each work undertakes, and that these are best studied by people who are interested in the psychology of the writer. The Homeric parallels in Ulysses are of marginal importance to the reading of the work but fundamental to the writing of it. Proust had to be suckered by Bergson. And so on. These beliefs and these forms have to do with the security and insecurity of going forward into the void. Writers have certain compulsions, certain ordering habits, which are a part of the book only in the sense that they make its writing possible. This is a widespread phenomenon. Certain rituals have to be gone through—in cooking, for example—which don’t affect the final product at all.>>24111904I get the feeling that he thought a great deal of Nabokov as a writer but not so much of Nabokov as a novelist. I never looked into it, just noticed that Gass often throws in a sideways jab when ever Nabokov comes up.
>>24111568>read the original or don't bothergets me every time.
>>24112006I agree, which is an opinion ftr that does NOT make me seethe. My feelings about Nabokov are that I like him partly for where he fails. I like how Gass puts it somewhere, that N is a "technician." >>24111875This is a very unusual subset, cool to see a rare approach. By the time I read Gift, I had already read so much of Nabokov and his life. As much as I believe the text stands alone, outside knowledge can and does form an extra-textual reading of the work. Thinking about the narrator and that passage where he is willing his father to come through the door, to return from his travels, return from death, and almost believes he will--it strikes something deep in me, which is struck louder knowing about Nabokov's grief regarding his own father's death. Sebastian Knight is also a deeply feeling book. I don't know how much you care about spoilers, but as someone whose sat at the deathbed of a loved one, the ending moved me tremendously. If you have any desire to read more of him, I'd be curious how you felt about SK. Nabokov is such an interesting writer, in that really, in his themes, he is a writer of the banal and the sentimental and the ugly, but his Bergsonian and Proustian commitments to aesthetic perception and memory, and then the precision of the detail in memory, move him beyond the mundane. I also think that's why I gravitated so strongly to him--after an intense period of reading him, I literally saw the world different. It made me realize that literature (and art) can be a profound communication of an Other's perceptual modes and interiority. I could say the stuff about sentimentality about other works too: Bend Sinister, Glory, Lolita, Defense, etc. His fireworks are to some extent an attempt to re-estrange the conviction, one too sincere to survive as a direct statement, that love survives death, that art defeats cruelty and suffering. But Nabokov also has a yawning fear that they don't, which is the counterbalancing force of his power. It's a strong aesthetic stance. As for "Sterile"--at times. But I'd also like to say, sometimes we want the Badlands or the lush prairie, other times we want the tundra. I return to Nabokov again and again to get the cottony, cloying taste out of my mouth from certain writers.I go to other writers for other things, and Nabokov has formed his own territory.
>>24113536>sentimental and the uglythose are never inherent products of "themes" but of executions. thinking in terms of themes (in the generalities sense, rather than recurring elements) is a backwards approach to any piece of art anyways.
>>24114002I say themes as exactly that--a palette of elements and concerns. but what would be a better way to say that? I thought that was a commonly accepted way to describe someone's broad strokes
>>24111568I fucking hate how he doesn't fuck Emmie in invitation to a beheading.
