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‘Stalking Nabokov,’ Essays by Brian Boyd ...
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Sunday Book Review
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/books/review/stalking-nabokov-essays-by-brian-boyd.html?_r=1
Enchanted Hunter
‘Stalking Nabokov,’ Essays by Brian Boyd
By LELAND de la DURANTAYE
Published: March 30, 2012
Shortly before coming to America in 1940, on a ship that would be sunk by Nazi U-boats on its next voyage, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a novel about biography and art entitled “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.” In it we are advised to “remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.” No words might be better kept in mind while reading Brian Boyd’s “Stalking Nabokov.”
STALKING NABOKOV
Selected Essays
By Brian Boyd
452 pp. Columbia University Press. $35.
Boyd is best known for his tale of that teller — the two-volume biography he published more than 20 years ago, whose pivot is that fateful Atlantic crossing. A contextualizing word is in order on that biography. Nabokov was a writer of genius and an accomplished lepidopterist who narrowly escaped death at the hands of not one but two totalitarian regimes, lived a largely itinerant life, was intensely private, was personally unknown to his biographer, and delighted in deception. And he was the author not only of novels, stories, poems, plays, translations, literary criticism, scientific papers and chess problems in three languages, but also of a memoir, “Speak, Memory,” which is among the most novel and beautiful ever written, and thereby largely sufficient to terrify anyone aspiring to retell its tale. Chronicling this man’s life and art was Boyd’s task. Imagine it.
For this reason, one of the greatest points of interest in “Stalking Nabokov” is the tale of that telling: how Boyd first encountered Nabokov (“Lolita” secreted under his pillow lest his parents discover what he had), and how he came quite literally halfway around the world (from his native New Zealand) to write the biography. When he ran short of money while doing research at Cornell, he writes, he would climb aboard Greyhound buses moving like metronomes in the rural night so as to save the price of a room. He tells of the personal drama that arose from his publishing details he knew Nabokov would have wanted kept secret. And he tells of sifting through “masses of garbling, misconstruction and decomposing gossip.” The better the biography the less the reader has a sense of all the accident and incoherence out of which it was formed, and in this and many other respects Boyd’s biography is absolutely excellent. “Stalking Nabokov” gives its reader a sense of the difficulty of moving through the sheer mass of that material, out of which Boyd needed to tell a tale that would be true to the art and life of its subject.
This essay collection is about that process — as well as a great many other things. It is a miscellany marking the stations of Boyd’s Nabokovian studies, from 1990 to 2010, from Kyoto to Toronto, from literature to lepidoptera. The collection contains essays in which Boyd is writing as biographer and others in which he is writing as critic. More so than many a biographical critic (or critical biographer), he does not read the work through the life (or the life through the work) in any facile way. This does not, however, mean there is no point of intersection. That lies in what Boyd artfully calls “the riddle of who tells the tale” — the themes of concealed design and ghostly ventriloquism at the center of his criticism from the 1980s to the present.
It is always the case that different things interest different readers, but this will be particularly so here. The specialist reader is likely to be drawn to sections on archival holdings and critical debates, whereas a more general reading public will be more apt to find fascination in the sections on Nabokov’s butterflies, his metaphysics and the (surprising) point where the two converge. But for all those interested in tellers and tales, there is much here that will inform, enliven and enlighten the work of one of the greatest novelists of his century.h
Leland de la Durantaye’s books include “Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov.”
A version of this review appeared in print on April 1, 2012, on page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Enchanted Hunter.
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