why nabokov?
©1999 Why? is the property of Wim Van Hoof. Please do not reproduce without the author's permission.When I was about 15 years old, my father, who had a vast library, discovered that I had taken a copy of a Brautigan novel; he reproved me, admonished that such stuff was not for impressionable boys, and instead gave me Pnin to read (Dutch translation). But this impressionable boy didn't appreciate Nabokov and returned the book without saying a word, or even without being questioned by his father. Eleven years later, I read The Defense, and promptly fell, akin to the chessplayers' fall, in a dark depressed pattern of whatchamaycallit (careful not to use Freudian terms); this of course didn't keep me from reading Nabokov's other works, and I have to admit that I'm still an impressionable boy, because, if someone would ask me what I like about Nabokov, I would have to return silence, albeit a silence grown out of a reverie, a sort of Pninian reverie: my father probably knew quite well why he gave me Pnin to read.
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