Lemony Snicket on Nabokov

Via the Nabokv-L Listserv:

Despite its originality, the series does have a recognisable lineage. “Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey were enormous for me as a child,” Handler says, “and when I started doing this, I definitely kept them in mind.” The self-referentiality of the books can be traced back to his love of Vladimir Nabokov. “I was a Nabokov freak,” Handler says wistfully. “There’s something about the way he writes that drags my brain right in.” He says there is something Nabokovian about Lemony Snicket. “He’s an unreliable narrator, he’s distracted by detail and digression until detail and digression become the point of the thing.” Handler has written adult (“that sounds kind of dirty”) novels under his own name, which exhibit a similar playfulness. 

(The rest over at The Telegraph)


See related Nabokovilia here.

An Annotated Pale Fire Website

Pale Fire Notes is actually pretty awesome and impressive (despite the self-effacing description):

Being some incomplete and largely irrelevant notes and commentary on Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, first posted pseudonymously to thePynchon-L mailing list June to November 2003. Page references are to the 1989 Random House Vintage edition.

The website can be accessed at http://importantwork.com/text/palefire/index.html

SIGHTINGS: T.C. Boyle Interview & Hipster Puppies

T.C. Boyle on a Nabokovian narrative approach he used for The Women:

NW: You made some interesting structural choices with The Women—one was to have one of Wright’s apprentices, Tadashi Sato, narrate the story, and the other was to present the stories of Wright’s love affairs in reverse chronological order, so the reader learns how each of Wright’s love affairs ends before he learns about how it began.  Was your point in reversing the chronology that certain patterns repeated so regularly in Wright’s life that the timeline of it begins to seem circular?

TCB: Well you know I’m not allowed to say things like that.  But I very much like your interpretation.  Sure, it enables me to reflect somewhat on the pattern of not only that love affair but many other love affairs that people have had over time.  You know, where you’re obsessed with the lover and want to spend every minute with him or her, and maybe it doesn’t turn out so well and they become the worst person in your life.  So at each stage of this novel, we see the horrific harpy in the wings, and then we see her in the light of redemption as it moves on.  And furthermore, to use Tadashi Sato and his grandson-in-law in writing this is something I was inspired to do by Nabokov, for instance.  It’s just very playful and it allows the reader to reflect on history and versions of history and what’s true and what’s not.

(The rest of the interview is here.)

Also: this Hipster Puppy asks you to be careful (Puppy's hip but can't spell). 

(Hipster Puppy via Autostraddle)

SIGHTING: Hertzberg's "Sparrin' Words" (The New Yorker)

On Obama and style:

He appeared to be in an unusually relaxed, even bouncy mood. He exuded confidence. The speech he delivered was no literary masterpiece (though by State of the Union standards it was downright Nabokovian), but it was a small triumph of tone and subtle theatrics. Despite the grandiosity of the setting—the curlicued proscenium, the massed dignitaries, the absurd aerobics of the endless standing ovations—the President managed to create a surprisingly intimate, almost conversational effect, as if the well of the House were a fireside and he was having a chat.

(The rest at The New Yorker: Sparrin' Words. (So yes: two New Yorker Nabokov nods in one week.)

SIGHTING: Gina Gershon Likes Lolita

Vd.: 

What is your favorite book?

One of my all-time favorite books is Lolita by Nabokov. I just think he’s such an amazing writer. It’s not the favorite because I have about a zillion favorite books. I’ve always liked The Art of Happiness, Dalai Lama’s book. I think that’s always a good go-to book if you’re feeling depressed. It puts things into perspective.

(The rest at In Search of Gina Gershon.)

And perhaps not unconnected: a bit of Nabopop: In Gershon's Showgirls, a character is referred to as a "one-day Lolita Pollyanna." I can't remember if it's Gershon ("Cristal Connors") or someone else.

Freud as a Fictional Character

I am quoting La Force about to quote Woods paraphrasing Nabokov:

As James Wood writes in his book How Fiction Works:

Nabokov used to say that he pushed his characters around like serfs or chess pieces—he had no time for metaphorical ignorance and impotence whereby authors like to say, “I don’t know what happened, by my character just got away from same and did his own thing.”

I have to suspect that even Nabokov would have had a hard time pushing Freud around.

(The rest at "Bossing Freud Around: Freud as a Fictional Character.")

Maar Kudos

Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov has been getting favorable press:

Maar is a literary sleuth, his method a Holmesian combination of instinct, some intellectual delegation and close reading...

(The rest of the blurb at the publisher's, Verso.)

VN Sighting: Anne Hathaway Discusses the White Queen

Ms Hathaway is a Nabokov fan:

Q: Why have his books been enjoyed for generations?

A: In my opinion, what makes a great book is something that is universally specific. I didn’t read the “Alice” books when I was a child. I read them when I was in college. I was really into Nabokov, and apparently, he was really into Lewis Carroll, so I thought it was a good idea. 

(The rest at WDW News: "Anne Hathaway Discusses The White Queen, Her Costume, and the Rest of the Cast")

On Sentiment

Amis on sentiment, by way of Nabokov on Dickens:

Yeah, well. We are all quite sentimental, a word that Nabokov defended. He wrote of Dickens and the death of Little Jo in Bleak House, I will not allow you to describe this as sentimental: people who use that word have no idea what sentiment is...

(The rest at Prospect magazine.)

Well Tended

"Well Tended," a story I wrote about talking plants and vanishing women, is in the current issue of Glimmer Train! (It's the Spring 2010 issue! #74). You can find it in all sorts of bookstores, or online. Buy five copies!

Loves That Bind

Julian Rios's Loves That Bind seems a likely candidate into Nabokovilia:

In true Rios manner, the list follows alphabetically and contains only women who bear a striking resemblance to literary heartbreakers, beginning with Proust's Albertine, Fitzgerald's Daisy, and on to Nabokov's Lolita.

Ada as a Difficult Book

Lawrence Weschler has observed, astutely, that writers tend to move from Romanesque to Gothic. The early work will be thick, solid, even heavy; only with decades of experience does the writer learn to chisel away excess, as the builders of Notre Dame did: to let in the light. In the case ofVladimir Nabokov, however, the converse seems to obtain. Of the major edifices he erected in English, his last, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle(1969), is his most excessive, both in its difficulty and in the pleasures it affords the (re)reader.

The rest at The Millions. (Reminds me of the line in Wonder Boys: "It's that kind of a book. Like Ada, you know, or Gravity's Rainbow. It teaches you how to read it as you go along")

Shrovis-Bishopthorpe Soap

I love Geo F. Trumper's sandalwood soap, and ditto for the packaging, but even so the slogan in the back ("Trumper's shaving requisites for the discerning") and some of the copy reminds me of Achewood's Mr.Teal Computer.

(And of course I realize that one's parodying the other, so it's a little like being all, Hey, R. Kelly's totally doing Aziz Ansari doing R. Kelly! But awesomeness sometimes requires that parody take precedence over what is being parodied.) 

Michael Maar interview

The BBC interviews Michael Maar in anticipation of the author's Speak, Nabokov (Maar's previous Nabokov outing, The Two Lolitas, was thorough and balanced (and introduced the concept of cryptomnesia into the mainstream), so looking forward to this thing too):

The author of a new study of Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction, Michael Maar, explains how the often tumultuous events of the writer’s life, including the death of his younger brother in a concentration camp, imprinted themselves on his work in surprising ways.

(Description & link via Verso.)

Fulmerford Site Updates! (But Not on the Fulmerford Site)

Hi there! I'm neck-deep in the dissertation, so I'm using this blog as a quick, temporary repository for all sorts of Nabokov material (the stuff that would normally go into the site). The hope is that, since it's all small bites, I'll be less lazy about posting stuff.

So yes: less lazy, more frequent.

On Looking Up Nabokov

Yes:

To search online after every unfamiliar word in Speak, Memory would be to invite a distracting systole of attention, drawing me away from the slightly faded pages and directing me to the screen’s eclat, then pulling back again, only to rush in towards the broken sentence abandoned for semiotic insight, my eyes searching for the syntagma where I left off.

The rest at Cagle's.

Laughter in the Dark cover

I'm thrilled to bits with the specimen-case Vintage reissues: they're elegant, they're lovely, and they're lepidopterally-minded without hitting your head over with it with a whole bunch of butterflies. I don't think there's getting away from the motif, at any rate, and besides John Gall did a terrific job of using it to generate a coherent, immediately identifiable set. (I'm way indebted to Gerard Genette in my dissertation, so the moment I hear "covers" I immediately think of his Paratexts.)

I'll be reposting a couple of less coherent, less immediately identifiable covers from a section of the site that was shunted over into Tripod ages ago. Since then, there's been a bunch of folk who've done a far more impressive job of collecting Nabokov covers. My own little collection, Postcards, is still around, but it's way smaller and way less comprehensive than A Nabokov Coverage and Zimmer's Covering Lolita: both are impressive, the former particularly for its extensive dedication to international editions.

• Addenda: More cover discussions today -- not on Nabokov but on the A-Frame. Click here for an explanation and an analysis and here for an extensive gallery.
• Even more addenda! (Via the VN Wikipedia entry.) More Nabokov covers! Robert Nelson's Vladimir Nabokov Writings - First Appearance Database (First Book/Pamphlet Appearances of Nabokov Writings)

Ada Online updated

Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer, has updated his terrific Ada Online with fresh and corrected annotations (see the ongoing discussion at the Nabokv-L listserv).

The Uncommon Reader

From Alan Bennet's The Uncommon Reader:

Less to her credit, before Norman's mysterious departure the Queen had begun to wonder if she was outgrowing him... or rather, out-reading him.Once upon a time he had been a humble and straightforward guide to the world of books. He had advised her as to what to read and had not hesitated to say when he thought she was not ready for a book yet. Beckett, for instance, he had kept from her for a long while and Nabokov and it was only gradually he had introduced her to Philip Roth (with Portnoy's Complaint quite late in the sequence).

I Love You, Man

Nabokov's Ada appears, for no discernible reason, in I Love You, Man.