In his 2001 book "La letteratura e gli dei" (
Literature and the Gods), Roberto Calasso twice mentions Nabokov. Initially, on
chapter Two ("Mental Waters") in which he adds to the interesting meaning
of "being ready to marry" which he finds in the word
Nymphé , another one that indicates the word
"fountain". Obviously, Nabokov's work is then "Lolita" and his definition of
"nymphet". Calasso praises in particular one of VN's sentences: "The
science of nympholepsy is a precise science." His second reference comes in the
chapter titled "Absolute Literature" when he mentions Nabokov together with
Baudelaire, proust, Hofmannsthal, Benn, Valéry, Audebn, Brodski, Mandel'stam,
Cvetaeva, Kraus, Yeats, MOntale, Borges, Manganelli, Calvino, Canetti and
Kundera. He writes that quite often these authors despise, ignore and oppose
each other but that, even so, all of them "speak about the same
object" under the protection of various masks. These hide and also
present the special luminescence that is revealed by a word, a
sentence, an entire book - for "literature is a being that is
self-sufficient" and, he proceeds, they express a "reality" that must
always be set inside a pair of commas which adhere to it like
fangs (quoting VN).