Linguoboy wrote: ↑Wed Aug 14, 2019 4:56 pm
Whereas my reaction was "If anyone had told me Nabokov was this funny, I would have read him a long time ago." I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud so many times at a "great novel".
In fairness, I did find the prologue genuinely amusing, and the beginning of the poem. The problem is, it doesn't feel like the jokes have moved on. Kinbote is still boorish and oblivious, and Shade's occasional moments of insight are still bathetically undermined.
Sometimes it does feel like an awful lot of effort to satirise a very modest target
Yes, I think that's a lot of the problem for me. It's this great storm of venom directed at someone I don't know, don't care about, and didn't feel any great respect for anyway. Yes, lots of people in academia probably are idiotic shitheads. I don't feel I need that case to be made at quite such length! It's like being on the jury at a murder trial, and the prosecution has spent the first two months building an impermeable case to prove that the person in the dock is indeed the person who was arrested... which the defendant has never denied. OK, we got that bit, now move on to the actual accusations...
, but the character of Kinbote is imbued with enough pathos that the satire never feels vicious. Maybe it's the nerdboy in me--or the homo, or the homo nerdboy--but I find the overweening need for acceptance and a sense of purpose that leads him to invent this fantasy world (if that's, in fact, what it is) deeply endearing. An old friend of my late husband's (another homo nerdboy on the fringes of academia) had a very similar reaction. Make of that what you may.
Well, he is pathetic, certainly - but for me, directing such a sustained attack against someone pathetic, coming from someone with (in academic terms) power and influence and prestige makes it feel MORE vicious than it would do otherwise. Maybe I'd have done better with Lolita - when the defendant is a predatory paedophile, it might make sense to target him with so much demeaning satire. But when it's just making fun of someone for being kind of a sad git, it feels uncalled for and unnecessary. I don't know which reviewer, professor or editor pissed Nabokov off so much to inspire him to do this, but I also don't really care.
It also doesn't help that in his character assassination, he's left his victim with essentially zero redeeming features. What's that Wilde quote? "The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible"...
Salmoneus wrote:Still, at least it's a more entertaining brick wall than The Quiet Don. [yes, I'm still theoretically reading that. Almost finished the first half. It's just getting bleaker and bleaker and bleaker...]
Thanks again for advising me that I could dodge this bullet.
Well, as this discussion illustrates, clearly our tastes diverge - you might love it!
To be fair to Sholokhov, I'm clearly not in a position to really render a sound judgement right now; my struggles with it are only 30% the book, and 70% me. It is interesting, and there are great passages in it. I really liked it when I started it, and I wasn't wrong to do so. It's just... it's so rambling, and repetitive. I think some people probably see this as elegaic and poetic, but I find it dull.
Actually, what I realised the last time I was reading some of it is that it probably worked much better how it was originally published: in serialised form. That maybe it's not so much a random wandering from character to character, and more just a series of interlocking vignettes. The long elegies, meditations on death and painstaking descriptions of foliage would also seem more poetic, and less like filler, if you treated it more like a weekly installment of a worldview, and less like a really, really long and repetitive essay to be read in one go.
I've actually not yet given up on the novel, and I think that when I feel up to it I'll try to finish off the first half adopting this sort of mentality, and not trying to read it in a way in which it was not intended to be read...
) She has an interesting analysis about how communication differs based on what "era" you entered the internet in that completely lines up with my intuitive assumptions (I am a Full Internet Person, evidently, which explains a lot about my language use online). And I finally understand why old people use ellipses so much (but not old people who've been on the internet the whole time)!
Encarta had some pretty old songs. Nice songs btw!
