J. Aisenberg to L.Hochard [...]"The
thing especially where Wolfe brings up how he feels his imaginative trip to
Bombay is more real than his friend's actual trip strikes me as the
most fatuous idea of all: just because the friend doesn't cater to his cheesy
romantic "far east" exotica cliches, he thinks the man is dull and spiritually
lacking somehow. Maybe if Wolfe were a little more interested in what the man
had experienced, he might have made discoveries about the place that
far outstripped the canned glamor of his fantasies."
JM: I couldn't agree more about
"canned glamor or his fantasies" versus "experiencing real India" and this
is why I thought Nabokov conveyed both ideas thru the Baron: the alienation of
"ars gratia artis" and the connection bt. real life's quotidian objects
and people and "the otherworld", through art.
As a winter treat I found myself surrounded by a pile
of pocket-mystery novels by Bioy Casares, Borges, Poe while musing about
Roberto Arlt's (1900-1942) tactics of casually introducing a dainty purse,
nonchalantly carried by a dainty lady, only to have this same purse perform an
important function later on - and Nabokov's equally casual reference to
small unimportant objects now potentialized in every page of novels such as
"Ada, or Ardor". It was when the cover of George Simenon's Brazilian
2006 edition of GS's 1966 "Maigret et les breves gens" caaught my eye.
A chess game and a familiar profile and...voilá! a VN sighting. There is chess
in the novel and Maigret himself is extremelly clever, rather corpulent and
unable to drive a car. The picture was taken by P.Halsman in 1966,
Montreux.