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[NABOKOV=L] A return to Nabokov's H.G.Wells,
coming through in a dream
coming through in a dream
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The Neglected Books Page » TLS Reputations Revisited neglectedbooks.com/?page_id=145
Source: "Reputations revisited," Times Literary Supplement, 21 January 1977
The first issue of the TLS appeared on January 17, 1902. To mark our 75th anniversary we asked a number of writers, scholars and artists to nominate the most underrated and overrated books (or authors) of the past seventy-five years. This feature is remembered now for two reasons: first, the revival of the reputation and works of the English novelist Barbara Pym; second, for Vladimir Nabokov's odd choice of H. G. Wells' lesser novel, The Passionate Friends, which one Wells biographer described as, "by anybody's standards . a solemn and boring book."
The responses are presented in the order of the original article. I have omitted the "overrated" responses.
Vladimir Nabokov:
The Passionate Friends by H. G. Wells is my most prized example of the unjustly ignored masterpiece. I must have been fourteen or fifteen when I went through its author's fiction after some five winters of tacit access to my father's library. Today at seventy-seven I clearly remember how affected I was by the style, the charm, the cream of the book, while not bothering about its "message" or "symbols" if any. (I have never reread it and now I see it as a coloured haze leaving only some final details - growing a little closer to me in time - still coming through.)
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