the lending library
My first experience with Nabokov was at a lending library run by a non-denominational American church group in Bogota, Colombia. They charged about $5 per year and had tons of novels, and their schedule was organized around the time of the volunteer church-members, so that you would knock, pet a decrepit German shepherd and talk to the gardener, who would open the door of the church, lead you into a patio, and let you wait in a courtyard for someone to open the little library, off to the side, next to a choir practice room -- this remove was a sidewalk and a few walls away from the bustle of Bogota.The library, at any rate, was one of the few places where English books were available and, since I'd dropped out of college and was writing for a small English-language weekly which paid poorly and late, it provided me with the bulk of my reading. I hit upon Nabokov by pure chance, browsing. Pale Fire's preface fooled me completely---right up to the amusement park bit, and at that moment, chuckling, there was that tingle of the spine, the sense that a trap-door had opened on the page and that something bright and shimmering lay just off to the side, on the bottom, on the next page, on the third reading of the same line.
I checked the book out and returned to the newspaper office. The Arts editor, ---- -----, once a young piano prodigy, saw the cover of the book and said, "I didn't know that he also wrote." She had confused Vladimir with his son Dmitri, whom she had seen in concert in Bogota a few years back. Coincidences and concordances in life, minor miracles, never really struck me until I saw them reflected in Nabokov's novels---for which I'm still grateful.
I'm still discovering all sorts of minute signs of design and grace in Nabokov's novels. I'm back in school. Back in the US.
Buying and finding books is easier, but my happiest reading memories -- disorganized, messy, devouring paragraph after paragraph -- are still tied to that lending library where the Nabokov shelf was well stocked (not far from Naipaul, two steps from Rushdie), and to my apartment (ADA by candlelight during a power outage), which overlooked the broken spine of the cordilleras, from where the green windows of the military hospital revealed patients who would stand a block and a half away, and look directly down on you and on the rest of the Bogota skyline, and when you waved they would wave back.
©1999 The Lending Library is the property of J.M. Martinez. Please do not reproduce without the author's permission.
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