(Original Review, 2002-06-25)
One of my oldest friends, both female and a
graduate in English loathes Lessing, and I could just as easily wonder how
Nabokov can offer anything superior to Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent,
Nostromo or Victory, which must have one of the most memorable lines in English
literature when the sinister Mr. Jones tells Heyst: "I am the world
itself, come to pay you a visit." Nabokov was famous for his dismissive
remarks of other writers, from Gogol to Pasternak, and said of Conrad: "I
cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of
romanticist clichés. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I
would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are
hopelessly juvenile", though he loved Conrad as a boy and seems not to
appreciate any maturity in Nostromo or The Secret Agent, possibly because
Conrad's Russians are often not very nice people. But then, Nabokov was not a
nice person, murdering butterflies for a hobby and pinning their corpses to a
board to be admired. Sad.
I agree on taste and opinion, the problem with
Nabokov for me is that I don't find him 'sincere'. Personally I read Nabokov
for his finery and off centre grip of language and that rarest of perception,
but saw him as an at times intolerable sociopath, almost pathologically
resentful of the quotidian and ordinary due to a lost White Russian heritage.
He despised the left, the "common man or woman", or the average
academic. Real recoil spasm stuff. Tragic. But what an artist.
(He also loved to whip and needle the middle
class, disdained the bourgeois. To torture middle of the road tabloid mores. To
be it was disproportionate and excessive. But of course speaking of art and Pen
and so on, you can't say that to Conrad. "Pale Fire" is an enjoyable
read, but the work of an arrogant man convinced his own writing is superior to
others, much as he was convinced his translation of Eugene Onegin was the most
faithful to the original, though most readers prefers his extraordinary notes,
where the notes to Pale Fire are playful. But then he will depart from the
script to attack Marx and Freud and it becomes personal rather than artistic. I
know people love his use of language but to me it is brittle, lacking in depth,
and often -as with Despair- just not interesting.
Reading Mann is like climbing onto the most
comfortable featherbed in the world. Relax, you are in the hands of a Meister
Geschichtenerzähler, off we go now. Yes, they belonged to different schools,
but comparing the abilities of the inchoate Nabokov with one of the giants of
20th c. literature, is a very odd thing indeed. I think Nabokov vastly
overrated, mostly by Americans.
And I just wanted to write about “The Secret
Agent” and Russian spies...Too bad Goodreads…
