By rejecting fads and politics, by refusing to have anything to do with what he called "novels of ideas," Nabokov's books (both those he wrote in his native Russian and those written in English) are still fresh and sprightly. They're funny, complex, harrowing, and unbelievably readable.Nabokov's energies were devoted to writing and to collecting (and classifying) butterflies. One passion borrowed from the other. Writing, he said, required "the precision of poetry and the excitement of science." He once proposed an illustrated coffee-table book on wing mimicry. Though never actually published or written, it would have shown inexplicable, beautiful, utterly weird butterfly wing designs that imitate human signs and symbols: numbers and letters.
Nabokov's novels mirror these wings. They are odd, but also precise and somehow natural. Both wings and novels seem to point to an invisible hand -- an invisible hand, moreover, armed with a joy buzzer. Fate or its stand-in, McFate, lurks and pulls the levers.
Everything in a Nabokov novel has a purpose, or seems to. Every word carries weight, which doesn't stop the author from poking fun at Eliot's poetry, psychology, contemporary kitsch, you name it. There is a sort of tug-and-go game between author and reader, reflected in the fiction's benignly lunatic imagined world and in its bemused and befuddled observer. And also skewed narrators galore, grand passions, word-play, crisply drawn landscapes, parks, gardens, hidden images, and river-bright themes. His "real" world is riddled with trap-doors.
Imagine a rover trudging through the surface of Mars and snapping a color photograph in one of those odd nooks where we haven't yet been -- imagine that there, along with the rocks on the red sand, is a Snickers wrapper.
And it's a really good photograph.
Move that image, that mingling of awe and absurdity, into what you'd think is a fairly normal patch of our planet, some suburb or campus, pre-revolution Russia, anywhere, and that's as close to describing what happens when you read Nabokov: grand cosmic design plus banana peel.