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It's odd, the one thing that's been most sticking with me since I finished this a few days ago was whether the poem proper could be called a good poem or not. "Stands on its own." For a while I just wanted to call it wildly uneven--it's tremendously overwritten at points, the entirety of it done in simplistic and sometimes forced rhyming couplets. It certainly doesn't hold up stylistically or critically to Robert Frost. Truth be told it's rare for a talented novelist to also be a talented poet, so it's hard to trust one way or another where and if Nabokov intended for it to be revelatory and beautiful or whatever (and/or not). I wasn't really successful in finding much other poetry from him. There are places get very strong. For me that was around Hazel's suicide, and the fall into a singular, incredibly strong image right at the very end. But I don't think it has to be good or bad in the way I've been trying to understand it. Maybe it doesn't exist externally of Kinbote's commentary, the whole of the book. Maybe what I called unevenness is what lets the novel work at all. It has to exist simultaneously as a poem that could have been written by a beloved and talented poet (though not necessarily in its final draft), a hack who was cut out to teach English poetry but not to write it, a madman trying to imitate the style of a famous poet (and maybe even a ghost obsessing over death and memories of color and light over all considerations, if one interpretation I've read is to be considered). It has to be all of these things, not at different places or points in time, but all at once. Kinbote tried to describe the poet writing: "John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, recombining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image music." Taking the whole world apart, looking at the pieces from every angle, then making something new, a different whole but the same pieces. In a way, Nabokov does the opposite.
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Aug 23, 2016 06:21
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I like to call this book "Fail Pyre" because it's bad and I think it should be thrown into a bonfire
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Aug 30, 2016 20:02
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:We need noms for next.month Due to some quirks of copyright law, some of the PG Wodehouse books are public domain in the US (not necessarily in other countries though). Right Ho, Jeeves would be easy to get for US goons and is hilarious + easy reading. e: Stephen Fry and John le Carre both love the book and Fry once said, quote:The masterly episode where Gussie Fink-Nottle presents the prizes at Market Snodsbury grammar school is frequently included in collections of great comic literature and has often been described as the single funniest piece of sustained writing in the language. I would urge you, however, to head straight for a library or bookshop and get hold of the complete novel Right Ho, Jeeves, where you will encounter it fully in context and find that it leaps even more magnificently to life. Mover fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 21:46
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