Little by little, bit by bit, I'll be reintroducing bits of Nabokovilia from the old site. Here is the first (
additional bits of Martin Amis Nabokovilia available here.)
From The Information:
Even when he was in familiar company (his immediate family, for instance) it sometimes seemed to Richard that those gathered in the room were not quite authentic selves -- that they had gone away and then come back not quite right, half remade or reborn by some blasphemous, backhanded, and above all inexpensive process. In a circus, in a funhouse. All flaky and carny. Not quite themselves. Himself very much included.
He said, 'Is this without interest? Nabokov said he was frankly homosexual in his literary tastes. I don't think men and women write and read in exactly the same way. They go at it differently.'
'And I suppose,' she said, 'that there are racial differences too?'
He didn't answer. For a moment Richard looked worryingly short-necked. He was in fact coping with a digestive matter, or at least he was sitting tight until the digestive matter resolved itself one way or the other.
*
'But that was... Wasn't that just a maneuver? To avoid a homosexuality scandal," said Richard carefully. 'Advice from Gide. Before Proust went to Gallimard.'
'Nabokov,' suggested Balfour.
'Yeah but that was just a book of love poems. When he was a schoolboy.'
'Nevertheless. Philip Larkin. And of course James Joyce.'
*
Richard had hated all the poets and novelists too, but the playwrights, the playwrights... With Nabokov, and others, Richard regarded the drama as a primitive and long-exhausted form. The drama boasted Shakespeare (which was an excellent cosmic joke), and Chekhov, and a couple of sepulchral Scandinavians. Then where were you?
From London Fields:
When she arranged this meeting with Guy, over the telephone, Nicola stressed the need for commando or bank-caper synchrony ('Unpunctuality throws me utterly. It's tiresome, I know. The orphanage, perhaps...'); but this didn't stop her keeping him waiting for a good fifteen minutes ('Please, sit down!' she called from the bedroom. 'I do apologize'). She needed fifteen minutes. One to envelope her bikini in a plain white cotton dress. Another to give the bedclothes a fantastic worrying. What was the delightful phrase in Lolita: the guilty dissaray of hotel linen suggesting and ex-convicts saturnalia with a couple of fat old whores? The rest of the time Nicola needed for make-up...