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Novels 1955-1962: Lolita / Pnin / Pale Fire

di Vladimir Nabokov

Altri autori: Vedi la sezione altri autori.

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511447,288 (4.58)4
Lolita (1955), Nabokov's single most famous work, is one of the most controversial and widely read books of its time. Funny, satiric, poignant, filled with allusions to earlier American writers, it is the "confession" of a middle-aged, sophisticated European emigre's passionate obsession with a 12-year-old American "nymphet," and the story of their wanderings across a late 1940s America of highways and motels. Pnin (1957) is a comic masterpiece about a gentle bald Russian emigre professor in an American college town who is never quite able to master its language, its politics, or its train schedule. Pale Fire (1962) is a tour de force in the form of an ostensibly autobiographical poem by a recently deceased American poet and a critical commentary by an academic who is something other than what he seems. The texts of this volume incorporate Nabokov's penciled corrections in his own copies of his works and correct long-standing errors. They are the most authoritative versions available and have been prepared with the assistance of Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist's son, and Brian Boyd, Nabokov's award-winning biographer, who has also contributed notes and a detailed chronology of the author's life based on new research.… (altro)
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I like fiction in which the artifice is overt. The writer does not dissolve behind characters, or plot, or some "realistic" world but remains at the edge of the frame, formulating, suggesting, manipulating the language, because language is art(ifice) and I want to see the hands and mind responsible, as the creator of a charcoal sketch or hewn stone is visible in the curves and scrapes of the material. (I was just reading about Piranesi in Robert Hughes’ book on Rome). Life is too short. I don’t want realistic, I want ingenious.

Here's Nabokov.

I read Pale Fire a few years ago. A pleasurable kick in the head. I found it hard to read fiction for a few weeks; everything else seemed slipshod and tepid. (I think it was The Third Policeman that finally broke the spell).

I just finished Lolita. No preconceived notion, expectation or assumption can withstand Nabokov’s logodaedaly (lifted from a Nabokov obituary [d. 1977]; I had to look it up), the prose by turns comedic, poetic, pitiable—the delusional, perverse self-justifications of a middle-aged deviant stitched into a pungent but empathetic parody of mid-20c. town life, road lore, junk entertainments and parochial condescension. In the afterword Nabokov writes that fiction exists only insofar as it affords “aesthetic bliss,” and in this Lolita succeeds. ( )
1 vota HectorSwell | Mar 16, 2013 |
I did not finish Lolita, have not yet started Prin. I did not like Lolita too much. Then why the five stars? Well, Pale Fire is a work of genius, I have rarely witnessed this level of literary perfection, intrigue, language, fantasy, creativity you name it! There are many good texts that you may need or want to try out, just to prolong the joy of Pale fire (I used, among others, Nabokov's Pale Fire
The Magic of Artistic Discovery, by B. Boyd 1999). The story is simple and deceiving. A neighbor of a talented writer (he also appears as a real author in Ada or ardor) helps out writing his final masterpiece, Pale fire, a poem with one unfinished line; the author can't finish the poem for reasons that I prefer to hide, spoiler issues mainly. But also other issues, I am not sure that I really understood why the last line is missing. But this is only one of the thrilling aspects of this short work. As others (Faulkner), Nabokov invents a country, a space, similar to Ada or ardor, a fictional world that to me smells of cold war, but could be any silent conflict situation.
This is a mathemagical masterpiece for the chess player, the psychiatrist (I strongly believe that this is a great bok on schizophrenia), a book for all thos who love books! ( )
1 vota Lapsus16 | Nov 28, 2011 |
Of these three, the one I hadn't read in years was Lolita. Always on returning to a book, the question is: does it still read well? Or, more "world-historically": does it still need to be read?

No. (Judgments are always brief, in the end, even if they come after a lifetime of reading.) For three reasons: first, Nabokov is compulsively excessive in his search for crystalline phrases, but that obsession is disconnected from the narrative, unless we are to believe that Humbert's vocation (scholar, not pervert) is sufficient justification.

Two: Nabokov doesn't notice that Humbert's vocation is so weakly and indifferently limned that it is continuously reminiscent, but insufficiently connected, to his own interests. (Are we supposed to wonder, briefly and distractedly, whether this or that literary judgment of Humbert's corresponds to one of Nabokov's?)

Third, and most serious: despite the narrator's protestations, the book is about sex, and so Nabokov's avoidance of that subject creates, in the end, precisely what he did not wish: a prudish book. His evasion reminds me of the book's now-vanished goal: epater le bourgeoisie.

On the other hand, when I next re-read Pnin or Pale Fire, I imagine I will be entranced all over again, because there preciousness, evasiveness, and compulsive over-writing all make perfect sense.
1 vota JimElkins | Apr 4, 2010 |
"Reading Lolita in Berkeley"
I am not as well-read as I should be, considering my literary and intellectual pretensions. I stare guiltily at ubiquitous shelves of classics and add them to a vague mental list of things I really should get around to reading. Even when my friends foist Dickens or Steinbeck on me, I keep the books for too long and return them, sheepishly, unread, having wasted my time with another reread of the Lord of the Rings or Ender's Game or Jane Eyre.
To read a book, to really commit to reading a classic of the canon and all the mental and emotional energy I expend on truly reading a work of literature, I have to be tricked into it. I have to be tantalized and I have to have my curiosity aroused. I have to be seduced. So in seventh grade, a history teacher's off-handed mention of Roots during our African unit led me to the tome. So in ninth grade when I read in Orson Scott Card's introduction to Ender's Game that he had been inspired by Asimov, I went and inhaled The Foundation Trilogy. Also that year, hearing my English teacher sing his praises, I dove into Tolstoi and read Anna Karenina. A delightful prompt in my AP English class made me go out and purchase Middlemarch the next day. My reading habits are nothing if not eclectic.
A few years ago, I discovered that Lemony Snicket was a pseudonym (a word which here means a fake name) for a novelist named Daniel Handler and that he had written several adult, and rather disturbing, novels. Reading an interview with him on Amazon.com, he mentioned that his favorite book was Lolita. Now, I had heard the term before, being a manga and anime fan, and perhaps even vaguely knew that it was a novel. I looked up a synopsis. I was disgusted. Lolita was the lyrical tale of a middle-aged European emigre's love affair with a twelve-year-old American school girl. Daniel Handler in my mind stood condemned as one creepy bastard.
So, last week I read a news report on The Leaky Cauldron that Bloomsbury was releasing a special edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone with a foreword by Jo herself. Included was a list of her top ten must-reads. On this list was Lolita.
Well, now I HAD to read this book. I bought it yesterday at a local used book store and came down with a severe case of book fever. I finished it about forty minutes ago.
My hat, if I wore hats, is off to Vladimir Nabokov. I believe the literary pros when they call him one of the best authors of the 20th century. This book is one of those "works of genius." And I have now been able to regain my respect for two of my favorite children's authors.
Humbert Humbert, the protagonist and narrator of Lolita (the self-same European emigre and pervert and rapist) is perhaps the most horrifying literary monster I have yet encountered. He is a psychopath, a narcissist, and has that magnetism which his more fantastic literary brothers Erik and Dr. Hannibal Lecter possess. Ah-ah-ah, but with the subtlest brush strokes and deliberate rips in the fabric of his character, Nabokov continually strips him of the romanticism that Humbert aspires to. A certain romanticism that Erik and Lecter retain, causing those with Daae and Starling impulses quite a lot of consternation. Humbert would have himself and his reader believe he is an aspiring Rochester or better yet, Heathcliff, but the careful reader will never be completely convinced. His self-awareness is cunning, his passions are the meaningless tantrums of an emotional idiot, he is fascinating in that despite the most gorgeous manipulation of the English language I have perhaps ever seen has been put at his disposal he remains an aesthetic dullard, a "monster of incuriosity" as one critic named him. He is shallow!
Count Olaf is his caricature. The villains of Harry's world all have this element of evil shallowness. Handler and Rowling have learned the lessons of Lolita.
C.S. Lewis shares this interpretation of evil (or my interpretation of Nabokov's interpretation of evil), most clearly seen in the demon encased in the corpse of the antagonist of the first two books in the Space Trilogy: the un-man. The protagonist's insight into this monstrosity echoes my insight into Humbert Humbert: "this creature was, by all human standards, inside out--its heart on its surface and its shallowness at the heart." (Perelandra, pg 106)
Lewis's robust allegories and interplanetary romances and Nabokov's lyrical, wild "modern" novel and books like it reveal the fascinating, horrifying shallowness of evil. One tends to think of evil as this rich, dark, mysterious thing. People speak archly and even reverently about some delicious dark side. But the serious artists, the serious intellectuals, the serious human beings only find wings of black paper on the back of Lucifer, the nonsense of evil in its most eloquent tracts.
I wish I could say that the shallowness of evil makes the fear of it shallow as well, but that is not true. I am more frightened and revolted now than I was back when I was afraid of the bogeyman. ( )
1 vota Topsy | Apr 12, 2007 |
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Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
Vladimir Nabokovautore primariotutte le edizionicalcolato
Boyd, BrianA cura diautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
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Lolita (1955), Nabokov's single most famous work, is one of the most controversial and widely read books of its time. Funny, satiric, poignant, filled with allusions to earlier American writers, it is the "confession" of a middle-aged, sophisticated European emigre's passionate obsession with a 12-year-old American "nymphet," and the story of their wanderings across a late 1940s America of highways and motels. Pnin (1957) is a comic masterpiece about a gentle bald Russian emigre professor in an American college town who is never quite able to master its language, its politics, or its train schedule. Pale Fire (1962) is a tour de force in the form of an ostensibly autobiographical poem by a recently deceased American poet and a critical commentary by an academic who is something other than what he seems. The texts of this volume incorporate Nabokov's penciled corrections in his own copies of his works and correct long-standing errors. They are the most authoritative versions available and have been prepared with the assistance of Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist's son, and Brian Boyd, Nabokov's award-winning biographer, who has also contributed notes and a detailed chronology of the author's life based on new research.

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