What is there even left to read after him?? Why is his prose so good?
>>24946325>What is there even left to read after him??everything. he is good for teaching you how to read well and what to pay attention to. after reading him, the good becomes better, the bad becomes worse.>Why is his prose so good?specific and inventive. always a qualified color, a particular person, some play on perspective, something small made big or big made small, some new rhetorical device, some pun, some structural secret, and a wild variety of emotions and tones.
>>24946371>specific and inventive. always a qualified color, a particular person, some play on perspective, something small made big or big made small, some new rhetorical device, some pun, some structural secret, and a wild variety of emotions and tonesHow do you even learn to write like this?
>>24946325Poetry?
>>24946371>>24946375Kindly share some of his best writing. I’ve personally always found his writing to be somewhat artificial and lacking a certain rawness that I personally appreciate a lot.
>>24946385"Under my glancing finger tips I felt the minute hairs bristle ever so slightly along her shins. I lost myself in the pungent but healthy heat which like summer haze hung about little Haze. Let her stay, let her stay … As she strained to chuck the core of her abolished apple into the fender, her young weight, her shameless innocent shanks and round bottom, shifted in my tense, tortured, surreptitiously laboring lap; and all of a sudden a mysterious change came over my senses. I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body. What had begun as a delicious distension of my innermost roots became a glowing tingle which now had reached that state of absolute security, confidence and reliance not found elsewhere in conscious life. With the deep hot sweetness thus established and well on its way to the ultimate convulsion, I felt I could slow down in order to prolong the glow. Lolita had been safely solipsized [1]. The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars; we were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her lips were apparently still forming the words of the Carmen-barmen ditty that no longer reached my consciousness. Everything was now ready. The nerves of pleasure had been laid bare. The corpuscles of Krause [2] were entering the phase of frenzy. The least pressure would suffice to set all paradise loose"Truly, you really need to read the books to really appreciate what Nabokov is doing, a single excerpt may not be fantastic if you are not immersed first into the novel. >artificial and lacking a certain rawness This may be half true, it reminds me of Gaucho by Steely Dan, an album so sophisticated and highly engineered that leaves almost no room for spontaneity, however I love the extreme care he took with his writing, Nabokov is like a little demiurge.
>>24946400Awful.
>>24946407I accept you got filtered
>>24946375how i imagine it works: read more, observe small things, observe things that differentiate things from other things and always be more specific, try to make unobvious connections, try to replace anything you recognize as ready-made in your thought, make your memories more memorable by associating something with another thing...in his essays he talks about writing as the creation of a reality, about how things are more real if they have more information, and about how the less you take for granted a reader's assumptions of reality and the more you build that reality from scratch the better the writing will be.>>24946385what have you read from him and who do you normally like? emotion in his works can be hidden behind the deception and perception of his pretentious prick narrators. although the best place then i think is definitely a short story called first love (a chapter from his autobiography), even there there is so much deception that goes into making it beautiful, like the best part when he writes that he forgets the name of a certain something then remembers it, which he obviously doesn't actually forget and remember.and just to understand better, what do you mean by rawness? directness, sincerity, emotional punchyness?
>>24946400>I lost myself in the pungent but healthy heat which like summer haze hung about little Haze.This is exactly what I meant by ‘artificial’. The overt alliterations, following ‘haze’ with ‘Haze’… idk. But you are correct, it’s not fair to judge any writer on an excerpt, context is always necessary to get into the feel and flow of things. What would you consider his best works? I am open to giving Nabokov another try, as long as it’s not Lolita.
>>24946515>what do you mean by rawness? directness, sincerity, emotional punchyness?I admit that it’s very hard to specify the term, but what I speak of is a certain desperation for expression that, by nature, is devoid of any (pseudo-)intellectual peacocking, which is something that Nabokov displays a lot. Perhaps I am somewhat influenced by his overall arrogant/elitist attitude and his many critiques of other writers (I subscribe to the idea that there is a separation between the true artist and the critic, the latter of which Nabokov clearly embraced despite his reputation as a great author). For a lack of better words, I feel as though I don’t really ‘enter’ Nabokovs soul when reading him, but only his intellectual mind. Whereas, for example, I only need to read half a page of Pessoa to feel like I am a fly on his wall, observing him. It’s not a matter of complexity or prose, as I don’t get the same feeling with Joyce or Beckett for example, but a matter of honesty and desperation. (You can fool the audience and still be honest, btw.) To me, Nabokov’s writing is very much like a very technically impressive symphony that somehow fails to connect on a deep level. Impressive, yes, but sterile.
>>24946550I would think this way if I only had access to Lolita. At least I wouldn't want to occupy the mind of a pedophile, and anyway the performance isn't convincing, its just some kind of game. This is surely not a great character--that's also the problem, in sense the opposite of what I just said in not wanting to occupy the mind of a pedophile, because its so obvious Nabokov playing a pedophile, the pedophilia is unconvincing and just at that point you have to wonder what the point of it is? Being into prepubescent girls is not exciting or interesting. Genuine disorder could be--I'd rather not find out.However the persona of Pale Fire is more delightful and comic, because it is Nabokov just being a more crazy version of himself, and the book is also a lot more brilliant than Lolita. People should just forget Lolita exists and judge him on Pale Fire. Pale Fire--what American book is better that this?I also read Glory and thought it was very moving, the way Tolstoy's works are, but this might as well be written by a different man. The problem a "cleverness" is problem in modern novel writing, which has to do with a lack of ability to find a genuine narrative pulse at a stage of advanced culture. Homer, the Old Testament are at the beginning of time, it seems. Adorno said this is more than just naivety but "stupidity"--he called this problem of cleverness fungibility, why should the elements be arranged as they are? Modern writers solved this by refining the style and being as clever as possible--a good but unsatisfying solution.
>the pedophilia is unconvincing and just at that point you have to wonder what the point of it is? Being into prepubescent girls is not exciting or interesting
>>24946400What a fancy way to describe getting hard from a tween. You need to have a pedophilic desire to write like this, though. You can't exert so much mental power on a rather banal action if the action itself doesn't excite you. Try to write like this about two men fucking while being straight.
>>24946646>Try to write like this about two men fucking while being straight.This is not as a brilliant argument as you think it is
>>24946550the other anon isn't me and i don't have a clue what he is talking about.i can understand where you're coming from, although honesty and desperation is still vague to me, and maybe there's some confusion of intent on your part that comes with a lack of familiarity with his stuff. but i'll just go on a bit more about how i view him. Lolita (narrated by a sappy psychopath) really is not a great place to start to get a feel for Nabokov's own soul (Pessoa is a terrible comparison). i don't find him to be a pseudo intellectual, although his narrators frequently are, and part of the fun is seeing the things that the protagonist is not seeing (like Quilty's name in a letter hidden from Humbert but visible to the reader). their lack of self awareness is not only a theme but a source of humor and horror and pathos to me. it is true that the puns and puzzles can seem clever for the sake of it, but i not only find most of them actually clever, but fun and in service of a unique tone and construction filled with hidden intentionality from the sentence level to larger levels.is he cold? yes. is he spontaneous? no. but there really is genuine emotion beneath the surface, a childlike fascination with patterns and details as well as the usual pity and spirit that comes with the plight of characters, and its all the more valuable for not being in the surface. in music there are sentimental progressions, in movies you can draw a smiley on a pebble and throw it into the ocean. these are known to get a response. i just think nabokov usually does something different, and its strangeness alone (as with his later works where you might feel less for the characters) is very valuable.having said all of that, the best place to start to see the range, the understatement, the emotions he is capable of would be the following short stories:>First Love>Details of a Sunset>A Russian Beauty>Signs and Symbolsi also do think someone who hasn't read Speak Memory or Pale Fire is missing out, even if they'd end up hating it.
>>24946504Nah, you people just haven't seen the light yet. I enjoyed Nabokov in my teens, but once you grow up it's just embarrassing, like Tarantino's films.
>>24946923>/tv/ user is a pseudShocking.
>>24946923
>>24946964>>24947005Samefagging and namecalling is pitiable. Keep being wooed and wowed by an obvious hack's hack works. I bet I'm better read, with a higher IQ and a more sophisticated humanist understanding of literature and the arts than you.
>>24947033I just know you pride yourself on the dullest pseudslop imaginable
