Blogtrotter - "Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955-62" (review)
:
wednesday, september 7, 2011
"Listening to Jeremy Irons' perfect audiobook rendering of the perfect
novel "Lolita" recently reminded me of the original work, so I went back to it
and I welcomed the screenplay paired here for pleasure; I also re-read "Pnin"
and "Pale Fire," which overlap obliquely. It'd been thirty years since I enjoyed
those three novels, and like Humbert Humbert, Charles Kinbote, and Pnin himself,
I'm about the same age-bracket as their creator was when he conjured up these
erudite, erratic, and eccentric characters who in turn, of course, play off of
himself, however much he may have denied it from his own niche in East Coast
academia in postwar America.
"Lolita" as a novel I found rare: it needed not
a word replaced; every adjective was necessary, each verb crafted, every
sentence chiseled. My comments would be superfluous, but in the Library of
America edition, Brian Boyd's notes pale before those in the annotated edition
by Alfred Appel, whose version I recommend. If you lack not only fluent French
but Russian, not to mention reams of insight into the worlds of art,
butterflies, popular culture of the time, and wordplay that anyone less
brilliant than Nabokov would not catch, Appel's edition supplants Boyd. Boyd
drew upon Appel's notes and as his biographer, Boyd adds a few tidbits among
those Appel did not in his reticence to expose certain facts gleaned from
interviews with Nabokov a few decades ago. However, as with the rest of this
handsome to hold LofA edition, Boyd's notes tend, as in many LofA commentaries,
to skimp, perhaps due to pressure to keep the books easy to hold. The sadness of
"Lolita" lingers, with its beauty. The screenplay Nabokov first wrote for
Stanley Kubrick was seven hours long, but from the shorter, if never produced
conflation of two versions here, I would have liked to read whatever Nabokov
created as he sought to transfer the gist of the novel into an entertaining,
deft story for the screen. It's a great counterpart to the novel, best read
after the printed text, naturally.
Pnin, who finds himself trying to get by at a college after the war, joins
other Russian expatriates at a summer gathering. He laments a "'typical American college student' who does not know geography, is immune
to noise, and thinks education is but a means to get a remunerative job."
(387) Some things never change.
Later at that gathering, Pnin learns of the
death in the Nazi camps of a woman he had loved, and he goes out to walk "under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in
an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of
the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in quick succession, attended
to the destinies of the quick." (395) But this reverie's snapped by the
mosquitoes. Nabokov in these tales does not allow his haunted, thoughtful
fellows to wander in the ether long. A professor chats with another; they look
up at the stars. "I suspect it is really a fluorescent corpse, and we are inside
it." (417) Metaphorical images arrest one's attention in these often everyday
tales, as characters jolt themselves out of themselves to look at a world that
does not synchronize with their internal (dis)orientation.
Two academics dominate "Pale Fire"; Pnin gets a mention from one
professor who mistakes Kinbote for him. Kinbote's commentary satirizes scholarly
obsession, as this titular poem by John Shade gets wrenched by Kinbote, an
emigre from Zembla with a complicated past, into Kinbote's own tale, even as he
notes that he has "no desire to twist and batter an
unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel."
(495) The odd delight of this challenging story lies in watching Kinbote's
obsession take over his task. He does not appear to realize how far Shade's
content lies from Kinbote's imagined reality, so details pile up. "But a commentator's obligations cannot be shirked, however dull
the information he must collect and convey." (556) He loses his grip on
what he set out to do: "Anybody having access to a good
library could, no doubt, easily trace that story to its source and find the name
of the lady; but such humdrum potterings are beneath true scholarship."
(624) Kinbote leaps into raptures, deriding Shade's seemingly secularized
temperament. Nature herself is rightfully chided as "the
grand cheat," who "puts into us" lust "to inveigle us into propagation." (621) Kinbote praises the
"Divine Embrace," and "the warm
bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule
unknown that had been the only real part of one's temporary personality."
(599) Even if Nabokov satirizes such faith, this is a marvelously written
passage. Man's life, as Kinbote sensibly for once notes, may be that "human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure
unfinished masterpiece." (636)*
These works show Nabokov at his best. I cited a few more off-beat sections
to show the sometimes overlooked two works that nestle next to "Lolita." These
four inclusions are highly recommended, and one only wonders, as Nabokov
disingenuously confesses, how his English-language efforts compare to his native
Russian ones, for he learned English as a baby, and he appears far more fluent
than Pnin! As often in these works, the teller of a tale cannot always be
trusted, or does not share omniscience. (Amazon US 8-27-11; see here 185
"Lolita"-related covers) posted by fionnchú at 12:08 am
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*- In a May 2012 posting to VN-L, Alexey
Sklyarenko independently sent a posting related to Life as a novel,
by Anonymous : "According to VN, N. M. Karamzin is the
author of one the best Russian epigrams: Что наша жизнь? -
Роман. Кто автор? - Аноним. Читаем по складам, cмеёмся, плачем,
cпим... ("Life? A romance. By whom? Anonymous. We spell it out; it
makes us laugh and weep, and then puts us to sleep.") Its target is clearly the
anonymous author of a romance that we all read only once (there will
be no rereading).// Pushkin, too, read his life as a
novel: И с отвращением читая жизнь мою, я трепещу и
проклинаю, и горько жалуюсь, и горько слёзы лью, но строк печальных не
смываю. ("Then, as with loathing I peruse the years, I tremble, and I
curse my natal day, Wail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears, But cannot wash the
woeful script away." Remembrance, 1828,
transl. Maurice Baring; or, if you prefer an unrhymed translation: "And I,
repulsed, review the story of my life, I shudder and I curse, Weep bitter tears
and bitterly complain, But cannot wash the dismal lines away.") One also
remembers EO's closing lines: "Blest who life's banquet
early left, having not drained to the bottom the goblet full of wine; who did
not read life's novel to the end and all at once could part with it as I with my
Onegin."