Juan Martinez Juan Martinez

Sighting: Maxim Shrayer on Five Nabokov Books

Pnin is the immigrant of Nabokov’s American novels. The main character is a Russian professor at an American college, and the novel is to a large extent about Russian culture misunderstood by Westerners. But it is also a truncated love story with a moral dilemma. Pnin himself is not Jewish but Mira, once Pnin’s beloved, is Jewish, and she died in Buchenwald. The story is punctuated by the tension of his trying to forget and being incapable of unremembering. Nabokov was one of the very first American writers to write extensively about the Shoah in a work of fiction. Nabokov wrote Pnin in the 1950s and parts of it were published in the New Yorker, so it is astounding how far ahead of his literary contemporaries Nabokov was in his thinking about the Shoah and how it might be remembered and memorialised.
Read the rest at Five Books. (Via the Nabokv-L forum.)
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I Tell You What To Wear

The July/August issue of Desert Companion is out! And therein I tell you what to wear (I also recommended two additional items that had to be cut for space, but they're pasted below the issue if you're curious):



The What-to-Wear Supplemental Items:


1.      The Hermes orange-and-pink cachemire belongs in the blazer’s pocket, though only a brief blush of color should be allowed to peek out: at this price point, the pocket square is a secret extravagance, like the bouquet of kayaks hiding in CityCenter’s austere façade. And if paying over a hundred dollars for bit of silk kept mostly out of sight feels, well, wrong, you may luck into our saleslady, who demonstrated how the cachemire doubles as a woman’s neckerchief. The Hermes two-fer! A bargain! ($130 in the CityCenter Hermes store or online, but the $2.99 Target skull-pattern bandanna is a nice option.)

The J.Press long-sleeve white-and-navy sailor shirt. All branding is aspirational, less about who you are and more about who you want to be. So let’s all agree that we’d much rather be by the ocean, right now, and not in the desert. Picaso, ever aware of fashion’s sensual and dreamy possibilities, wore the sailor shirt, but so have lots of other people. And so can you. ($110 for a nice, boat-neck, Made-in-France one at JPressOnline.com, though other retailers sell less expensive variations.)
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A+!

From Ian Frazier's Marginal:

Of special interest to readers of this magazine might be Vladimir Nabokov’s copy of Fifty-five Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940-1950. Nabokov’s handwriting (in English) was small and fluid and precise; in books that he took exception to, such as a translation of “Madame Bovary” by Eleanor Marx Aveling, his correcting marginalia climbed all over the paragraphs like the tendrils of a strangler fig. Nabokov was also a professor of literature, and in his copy of the New Yorker anthology he gave every story a letter grade. The way he wrote each grade in the table of contents next to the story’s title carried the authority of one who expects that hearts will soar or plummet at the sight of his boldly printed capital. Many of the stories did not fare too well, and would not have got their authors into a selective university. Top marks went to Jessamyn West’s “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (A-) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (A). Prof. Nabokov awarded only two stories in the anthology an A+: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” by J. D. Salinger, and “Colette,” by Vladimir Nabokov.
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More Nabokovilia in Martin Amis

So I knew there was some Nabokovilia in Martin Amis's London Fields and The Information, but it wasn't till I visited the former and revisited the latter that I found even more.

See page 303 of London Fields:
Vladimir Nabokov, encouragingly, was a champion insomniac. He believed that this was the best way to divide people: those who slept and those who didn't. The great line in Transparent Things, on of the saddest novels in English: "Night is always a giant but this one was specially terrible."
Fee fie fo fum, goes the giant. How did VN ever slay the thing? I wander. I write. I wring my hands. Insomnia has something to be said for it, in my case. It beats dreaming.


And see too page 238 of The Information:
To paraphrase a critic who also knew about beetles and what they liked, Kafka's beetle took a beetle pleasure, a beetle solace, in all the darkness and the dust and the discards.


Three observations:

  1. Amis, in The War Against Cliche, his collection of book reviews, loves to use the same sort of Transparent-Things-insomniacs-or-not-"There's only two kinds of people in this world" line as an opening hook (not often, but often enough: some examples: "It was in Joysprick (1973), I think, that Anthony Burgess first made his grand-sounding distinction between the 'A' novelist and the 'B' novelist" (113), "There are two kinds of long novel" (121), "Dipsomaniacs are either born that way, or they just end up that way" (207)). 
  2. The Information's Richard Tull's beetle thoughts have been only slightly reshuffled in transport. Nabokov's original line, from the Kafka chapter in Lectures on Literature, reads: "...curiously enough, Gregor, though a very sick beetle -- the apple wound is festering, and he is starving -- finds some beetle pleasure in crawling among all that dusty rubbish." (Tull festers a bit himself: bitter, ignored, he is a writer of unreadable fiction condemned to read and review lengthy, unreadable biographies.)
  3. There's Nabokov in Kingsley too! I'll be checking out the letters and Stanley and the Women presently.
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Nabokovilia: Getting It Published

I'm nearly 100% that this bit from William Germano's Getting It Published, is intentional Nabokovilia (and if so, way witty, given the professor's field of study):
An editor in psychology might acquire thirty titles a year in the field, five of which will come in through the efforts of Professor Quilty, the distinguished abnormal psychologist, whose extensive contacts have enabled her to build the respected series Narcolepsy Today.
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Nabokovilia: Zadie Smith's On Beauty

From page 315 of Zadie Smith's immensely pleasurable, terribly funny, aptly titled On Beauty:
She did it. She jumped off the bed and into his lap. His erection was blatant, but first she coolly drank the rest of his wine, pressing down on him as Lolita did on Humbert, as if he were just a chair she happened to sit on. No doubt she had read Lolita. And then her arm went round the back of his neck and Lolita turned into a temptress (maybe she had learned from Mrs Robinson too), lasciviously sucking his ear, and then from temptress she moved to affectionate high-school girlfriend, sweetly kissing the corner of his mouth. But what kind of sweetheart was this? He had barely started to return her kiss when she commenced groaning in a disconcertingly enthusiastic manner, and this was followed by a strange fluting business with her tongue, catching Howard off guard.
Smith, incidentally, is 3 for 3: her two previous novels also include a Nabokov reference. (Also check out her essay on Barthes and Nabokov in Changing My Mind.)
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Nabokovilia: Jim Barnes and Julian Barnes

From a poem in Jim Barnes's A Season of Loss: 
In the house where Nabokov finished Lolita
the foundation begins to settle, walls sinking in 
around a curving staircase, Lolita's legs still


From Julian Barnes' Nothing to Be Frightened Of:
It could, I suppose, be worse. It almost always can -- which is some mild consolation. We might fear the prenatal abyss as well as the post-mortal one. Odd, but not impossible. Nabokov in his autobiography describes a "chronophobiac" who experienced panic on being shown home movies of the world in the months before he was born: the house he would inhabit, his mother-to-be leaning out of a window, an empty pram awaiting its occupant. Most of us would be unalarmed, indeed cheered, by all this; the chronophobiac saw only a world in which he did not exist, an acreage of himlessness. Nor was it any consolation that such an absence was mobilizing itself irresistibly to produce his future presence. Whether this phobia reduced his level of post-mortal anxiety, or on the other hand doubled it, Nabokov does not relate.
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SIGHTING: Nabokov's Color Field

Carrie Frye contrasts Nabokov's color field to Muriel Spark's:
Through this "scattering of nutshells" (Lane's phrase) you get a portrait of Nabokov as a writer. I was reminded of it by Maud's similar collage of first sentences from nine Muriel Spark novels. Interesting to compare the two. For example, Nabokov's color field: azure shading into quivering blue, vivid greens and a spot of red. The only colors in the Spark selection: "almost white" and the "clear crystal" you come to after the "murk & smog" -- a fittingly chilly palette for a writer who writes as cleanly and sparely as Spark does.
The rest here. (Via Maud Newton)
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Nabokovilia: Pamuk's _Museum of Innocence_

I've been avoiding Pamuk for a while but may need to read Museum of Innocence for some Nabokovilia:
At a third level the book can be read as a meditation on the compulsion of collecting and, even, on the act of writing itself. For what is writing fiction but an obsessive collecting of and rearrangement of memories. The story is filled with intertextual references to the works of some of Pamuk’s favourite European authors: Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Nabokov and, above all, Proust. It could have easily have been entitled In Remembrance of Things Past. 
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