Nabokovilia: John Fowles' Daniel Martin
If I had a preferred line in the modern novel, it was the one that began with Henry James and descended through Virginia Woolf to Nabokov; all, in their different guises, of the confraternity, the secret society, who have known, and known exile, from, la bonne vaux.
We all like to think such personal preference reflects a general criterion, but of course it also, always, stems partly from personal failing -- betrays what we lack, what we long for from and in our lack, what we long for from and in our lack. I made one other note that morning.
If a life is largely made of retreats from reality, its relation must be of retreats from the imagined.
