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I bastardi (1947)

di Vladimir Nabokov

Altri autori: Vedi la sezione altri autori.

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1,6592510,484 (3.73)75
The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and com- pelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the gov- ernment attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime. One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." -- John Updike… (altro)
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Bend Sinister is the second novel that Nabokov wrote in English, the first he wrote in America; a novel fated to live in the shade of his later American novels, destined to be considered about something that is not what Nabokov himself said it was about, which is different from what it seems to be about to me. Contemporaneous reviewers no less than current ones were struck by his otherworldly mastery and use of his adopted language, though not always in a net positive sense. Reviews were mixed, with The New Republic's literary critic complaining that the novel reflected Nabokov's "apparent fascination with his own linguistic achievement," or in other words, that Nabokov was being a smarty pants show off.

Bend Sinister is typically said to be about living in a totalitarian state, and gets compared to Orwell's 1984. It certainly is set under a new totalitarian regime, a bumbling one that reflects Nabokov's opinion that dictatorships are marked by incompetent buffoonery more than by competent evil, and concerns a free man's absolute destruction by said regime. In his introduction written almost two decades later, Nabokov disputed this interpretation, writing that, "The story in Bend Sinister is not really about life and death in a grotesque police state... The main theme of Bend Sinister, then, is the beating of Krug's loving heart, the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to - and it is for the sake of the pages about David and his father that the book was written and should be read."

That's right, you think this is a grand political novel about totalitarianism, a useful Cold War cultural weapon fashioned by an anti-communist Russian exile, but really it is an affecting love story about parenthood. The editors who solicited and published this later introduction seem a bit incredulous themselves, writing in a preface, rather plaintively one feels, that "It is always a bit hard to say whether Nabokov is spoofing."

I read the novel in yet a third way, a novel about writing a novel. This is due to its meta-fictional elements (the text also includes homages to Joyce, for what its worth). Nabokov inserts himself as author directly into the work right from the first page. Although initially it appears the "I" in the brief first chapter is the main character, Krug, the final page shows that it is in fact Nabokov, or at the least a combined Krug/Nabokov. The book's opening:
An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.

Supposedly this is Krug looking out a hospital window and taking in the view. On the novel's last page, Nabokov has just brazenly broken the fourth wall
Krug ran towards him, and just a fraction of an instant before another and better bullet hit him, he shouted again: You, you - and the wall vanished, like a rapidly withdrawn slide, and I stretched myself and got up from among the chaos of written and rewritten pages, to investigate the sudden twang that something had made in striking the wire netting of my window.
Looking out his window, now writing a page of memoir rather than fiction, Nabokov notes
I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground.

Nabokov has taken his persistent fascination with doubles and reflections into the realm of meta-fiction here, mirroring the opening "fictional" paragraph with a closing "non-fictional" paragraph, making plain the author's incorporation of real life into fiction. At other times in the novel the perspective shifts from third person to first and back to third, drawing attention to the author's consciousness in deciding between approaches, and at times the author's thinking intrudes even more plainly, as in Chapter 5 when Krug visits his friend Ember in the latter's bedroom:
Ember gratefully adopts the subject selected. He might have asked: "Why then?" He will learn the reason a little later. Vaguely he perceives emotional dangers in that dim region. So he prefers to talk shop. Last chance of describing the bedroom. Too late. Ember gushes.

Nabokov will leave the bedroom undescribed, then. Fair enough.

Also interesting are the comments on translation included in the text. Nabokov had written nine previous novels in his native Russian. He had translated one, Despair, himself, in 1937. Another, Laughter in the Dark, had been translated in 1936 by an English translator, which Nabokov claimed to be greatly displeased by, and which was then re-written/re-translated by himself in 1938. He thus had some experience with the topic. Nabokov first addresses the subject in chapter 3, in the guise of Ember's translating of Hamlet:
The unfinished translation of his favorite lines in Shakespeare's greatest play - follow the perttaunt jauncing 'neath the rack / with her pale skeins-mate. - crept up tentatively but it would not scan because in his native tongue "rack" was anapaestic. Like pulling a grand piano through a door. Take it to pieces. Or turn the corner into the next line. But the berth there was taken, the table was reserved, the line was engaged.

Even more direct is he in chapter seven:
Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labor, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land and casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator's inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combinations of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a shadow exactly similar to that of Individual T - the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of suns rippling in the same position, at the same hour of the day. From a practical point of view, such a waste of time and material (those headaches, those midnight triumphs that turn out to be disasters in the sober light of morning!) was almost criminally absurd, since the greatest masterpiece of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of thought, in submission to another man's genius. Could this suicidal limitation and submission be compensated by the miracle of adaptive tactics, by the thousand devices of shadography, by the keen pleasure that the weaver of words and their witness experienced at every new wile in the warp, or was it, taken all in all, but an exaggerated and spiritualized replica of Paduk's writing machine?"

The remaining seven of Nabokov's Russian language novels would eventually be translated over the next three decades, always involving Nabokov himself, often including his son Dmitri. Never left to the "suicidal limitation" of some unrelated translator who had submitted themselves to Nabokov's genius in the making of a mechanical imitation. Nabokov clearly wasn't going to have that. ( )
  lelandleslie | Feb 24, 2024 |
Dystopian novel set in an unnamed country in the city of Padukgrad, protagonist Adam Krug is a well-known philosopher with an eight-year-old son. His wife died but he cannot bring himself to tell his son. The Ekwilist movement, the “Party of the Average Man,” is run by dictator Paduk, a former schoolmate. Krug is asked to support the party, but refuses. Published in 1947, the Ekwilist party is obviously based on a totalitarian regime.

The preface to this book indicates it should be read as a spoof, however, it did not read as humorous to me. The writing is erudite. I enjoyed the relationship between Krug and his son, whom he obviously loves dearly.

“And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.”

The ending is horrifying. I do not want to spoil it, but if you are easily disturbed by what you read, I would give this one a pass.

2.5 (based on personal enjoyment, not literary merit)
( )
  Castlelass | Oct 30, 2022 |
10. Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov
published: 1947
format: 185-page kindle ebook
acquired: February 28
read: Feb 28 – Mar 20
time reading: 10 hr 6 min, 3.4 min/page
rating: 4
locations: fictional autocratic state
about the author: 1899 – 1977. Russia born, educated at Trinity College in Cambridge, 1922. Lived in Berlin (1922-1937), Paris, the US (1941-1961) and Montreux, Switzerland (1961-1977).

Nabokov‘s first American novel pokes tragic fun at the Soviet Union and the surreal experience of arbitrary terror and constant warping of reality. It‘s a bit difficult, as he plays games with different languages, obscure English words and syntaxes. And I had trouble getting going. I felt for a while I was just hacking through trying to find some direction. There is a sense here of attack on the English language, and it might be intentional.

But ultimately the plot is clear enough. A philosopher and half-brother of a dictator suffers under this regime of terror both literally and psychologically. And, unwilling to serve and wanting to basically hide, slowly begins to lose his protection and immunity.

The book relishes in surreal absurdities. In his intro, VN says, “automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations or Orwell's clichés would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one.” But these two references go a long way to explaining the atmosphere of the novel and its dark humor. Nabokov works the tension of situations especially by mixing an irreverent dryer humor with dreadful happenings. That could be said for most of his novels, although he might go a little darker here. Certainly nothing was sacred in fiction for this author. (Bring on [Lolita]!)

2021
https://www.librarything.com/topic/330945#7464552 ( )
  dchaikin | Mar 27, 2021 |
The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. It is first and foremost a compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime.
  huayapam | Jun 11, 2019 |
This book reminded me a a little of "Invitation to a Beheading" because of the nightmarish, inescapable feeling of doom throughout the story. However, while "Invitiation" had a kind of Alice-in-Wonderlandish absurdity to it that makes it almost charming, this book is filled with sharp punches to the gut that are too disturbing to be charming. It is the story of one man's attempt to escape a totalitarian regime. Worth reading, but not really a pleasant experience. ( )
1 vota Marse | Sep 9, 2017 |
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Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
Vladimir Nabokovautore primariotutte le edizionicalcolato
Time-Life Reading Program EditorsPrefazioneautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
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An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky.
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The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and com- pelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the gov- ernment attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime. One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." -- John Updike

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Penguin Australia

2 edizioni di questo libro sono state pubblicate da Penguin Australia.

Edizioni: 0141185767, 0141197005

 

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