"This gem of a book just come as a joy to readers who were disappointed by last year's unearthing of The Original of Laura ...revelatory of the author's obsession with sexual desire, rather than an artistic treat. Speak, Nabokov steers a course between passing candour about the man and sophistication. It is a startling piece of literary detective work, which deciphers the word games and patterns that permeate Nabokov's novels in order to throw light on the author's life....Maar sets the "shimmer", a view of the world shot through with mysterious presences and coincidences, manifestations of light and shade, colour and shape...Nabokov's preoccupation with the other world was imaginative, not religious. Maar shows the affinities with gnosticism - a dark world permeated by sparks of light - and with Schopenhauer, who thought that art gave glimpses of goodness and release from human evil...When biographers and critics probe behind the scenes of works of art, they risk turning devoted readers into disenchanted gossips... Maar does the opposite...Much else in Nabokov's work acts as an extended inquiry into how literature can express sexual torment and not lose its own magic. With sentences such as "one usually reads past the devil, because he masks himself in idiom", Maar is no mean enchanter himself."

JM: When I first learned that "Speak, Nabokov" was a translation from the German it came as a surprise to me, because so much was taken for granted about Maar's "Speak, Nabokov," as if it existed only in English. The homage to Ross Benjamin's accomplishments his award made his role as translator very explicit.

Lesley Chamberlain's comments about Maar "as an enchanter," quoting him directly from Ross' translation ["one usually reads past the devil, because he masks himself in idiom"], is a further homage to the latter's success when he recreated the original and effaced his own spurs.

For me, the permanent foreigner to these shores, it's a growing cause for wonder. A German reader delving into Russian-American Nabokov's novels and life, setting his ideas down in German and rescuing Nabokov's present-day "failure" in the eyes of the American readers, disappointed with TOoL, who would be treated to Maar's "joy and gem..." as a compensation...What a twist! When translating Pushkin Nabokov was hardly as self-effacing as Ross, no?

Another theme: After reading Gary Lipon's and Gwynn's postings related to "Shade's madness", and Rowbery's inquiry about authorial winks in PF, I became curious about the VN, the author. Faking literary madness, in a consistent and convincig way, demands a very very special writer's skill and a theoretical background of the kind Nabokov often denies having cultivated (he advanced that a part of his information derives from newspaper reports about criminals). It seems that Nabokov has been succesfully convincing to a lot of his readers, no?

Search the archive	Contact the Editors	Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla	View Nabokv-L Policies	Manage subscription options