Reading post: Vladimir Nabokov in June

June is almost over, so I think it's time for another reading post. In June I decided to read books by Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), partly because I have always understood that it is "important" to have read Nabokov, but also because he was a lepidopterist. According to Wikipedia, in 1967 Nabokov said, "It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all." (Of course, you must take everything Nabokov ever said with a grain of salt.) In The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, which I loved, Nabokov wanders in and out of the stories, carrying his butterfly net, and that encouraged me to finally read Pnin last year, which I also enjoyed. So I decided that Nabokov would be one of my authors this year. And summer is the best time to look for butterflies, so it seemed like a good time to read Nabokov. 

However, I got off to a slow start on account of our trip to California. When we got back to Colorado on June 8th, I had two other books I had to finish first: the book for the book group and a library book I was 2/3 of the way through. I finally started reading Lolita on June 13th and then spent the next 12 days immersing myself in Nabokov.

• Lolita (1955). I started with his most famous novel. Wow, that is a hard book to like. I understand that the language is beautiful and amazing. The contortions Nabokov goes through to make a monster into a somewhat, temporarily, sympathetic character are impressive. But the story is so disgusting: a mentally unstable man in his 30s who is sexually attracted to prepubescent girls marries the mother of one such girl, the mother is hit by a car, and the man goes off with the girl (who, I should note, does not want to be with him). Maybe if I hadn't had a relative who was a pedophile I would feel differently about this novel. But I kept picturing Humbert Humbert -- who is supposedly movie-star handsome -- as my ugly relative. Part 2 of the book begins with an exhausting narrative of their year-long drive around the U.S., and it almost did me in. I get it, I get the point, I kept thinking. Why do we have to keep going? (Lolita the character probably felt the same way.) I felt that way about the book in general -- why does it have to be this long? I'm sure I missed dozens of clever tricks in the book, and I don't care. I don't want to know anything more about it.
  
  
• Pale Fire (1962). This book is considered by many to be Nabokov's finest achievement. It's interesting from a historical perspective, as an early example of metafiction and hypertext fiction (without the actual ability to jump from link to link). But the story itself... the novel consists of a 999-line poem supposedly written by a famous poet named John Shade, plus a Foreword, Commentary, and Index supposedly written by his neighbor, one Charles Kinbote. That structure sounded interesting to me, but it turned out to be another crazy person (Kinbote), another unreliable narrator, more male academics blithering on...
  
  You can read the book by jumping from one note to another, but after trying that, I decided to read the sections in order. I kind of liked the poem, though according to the internet, I'm supposed to think it's dreadful. It's Nabokov imitating T. S. Eliot, who he did not like (pointing out that his name is an anagram for "toilets")...  Then came the Commentary, where Charles Kinbote, instead of commenting on the poem, tells his own story, the story he supposedly told John Shade and expected him to write the poem about. Since Shade wrote the poem about his life instead, especially the suicide of his daughter Hazel, Kinbote uses the Commentary to tell his own story, all about a land called Nova Zembla where there was a revolution and the gay King (possibly Kinbote in disguise) was forced to flee. Kinbote is clearly a nut (or maybe imaginary), but his story is sometimes engrossing. After a while I got tired of it, though. I'm not sure the book works, if you find Kinbote worthless and boring. And the gay stuff -- that may have been exciting and racy in 1962, but in 2024 it just seems silly.
  
  According to Wikipedia, "[some] readers de-emphasize any sort of "real story" and may doubt the existence of such a thing." I don't want to read a novel that doesn't have a story. I could see that there were lots of games going on in the text, and for some people that might make it worthwhile. But I want more than games in a novel.
  
  The bottom line is that I thought Pale Fire was a waste of my time. I have no idea why people love this book.
  
  
• Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951, 1966). I could have read a third novel, but Nabokov's autobiography is claimed to be one of the best ever written, so I went with that. My first impression was that it was interesting, but it didn't make me like Nabokov. Such an elitist, so scornful of non-elites. But reading on, I changed my mind. Nabokov wasn't being elitist, he simply came from an elite family. For the most part, in this book he describes, in gorgeous, lush language, aspects of his childhood in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and then how his family had to flee to Europe and his life there. Most of it had a queerly detached sense, except maybe the chapter about his time at Cambridge and the one about the birth of his son. It ends in an odd, poignant way. I will keep this book, and probably reread it.
  

I'm continuing to puzzle over why I'm not entranced by Nabokov's fiction (though I did like Pnin). I may just have read the wrong books. In the comments section of the article in the Times where I got my recommendations, other people have suggested Ada or Ardor, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, and others. Maybe I'll try one of those someday. 

In the introduction to my edition of Pale Fire, which I didn't read until I was about halfway through the book, Richard Rorty makes certain claims about how Nabokov's books work.

He discovered that the best way to get his readers to notice suffering was to show it to them for a moment, then get them to forget it for a long time, and then bring it back again just as the reader has gotten completely caught up in the sheer beauty of the fantasy, the sheer joy of the prose.

I think my problem with Pale Fire and also Lolita is that I never got "caught up in the sheer beauty." I never forgot that Lolita was suffering, and I certainly never cared anything about King Charles of Zembla, only a little about John Shade and Sybil and their daughter Hazel. How could anyone feel differently? Maybe if you like stories of kings and hitmen, the Zembla part of the book would be enjoyable. I found it excruciating. I understand that people like to puzzle out the layers of meaning in the book -- was Kinbote really Botkin, is the whole Kinbote thing just a product of John Shade's imagination, blah blah blah. I just don't find it interesting.

 

So, OK, I've now read Nabokov. I still think Pnin was better than anything else I've read by him, so in some ways the last two weeks have been pointless. But I tried. It's funny -- Nabokov apparently strongly disliked women writers, until someone convinced him to give Jane Austen another chance and he decided he liked one of her novels. In some ways I think Nabokov may be more of a man's writer, that is, he may appeal more to men. (Though Zadie Smith and many other women love him.) I don't know, I don't know what the answer is.

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I didn't have much time to read anything else this month, lol. I didn't try to read a book from my teak bookcase. Maybe another year. I read a book from the library called A Revolver to Carry at Night by Monika Zgustova, which was sort of a fictionalized account of the relationship between Nabokov and his wife Vera. That was mildly interesting, but I think I'm done with the Nabokovs for now.

For poetry, I bought a complete works of Pushkin, but I plan to read it slowly and gradually.

I also started reading a biography of Florence Harding, and am now completely baffled by it. I plan to spend the last few days of the month trying to read it. Not much else to do -- it's so hot and yucky this week.

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In July, I have decided to challenge myself again -- it's summer, might as well. I am going to explore the works of the Brazilian (Ukrainian, Jewish) writer Clarice Lispector, who was born in 1920, so about my mother's age. I'm always seeing references to her work, but I've never read her, never even seen one of her books sitting on a library shelf. It turns out our library does own some of her books, and I've requested another from Prospector. We'll see -- this is a complete shot in the dark.