Word: nabokov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...narrator reminded me a little of Humbert Humbert [in Nabokov's Lolita], speaking of Russians and monsters...
...Yeah, except Humbert is arch, as well as being an assh---. Nabokov takes it one step further. I mean, the sexual bribes chapter, quite late on, begins with the sentence, "I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita's morals." That compounds the cruelty, because he's using it as the butt of his wit. So he's really complicatedly awful. It all works absolutely brilliantly. But my character's a bit more straightforward than that...
...Each individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the international canon. Look at Michael Chabon's. He heads it up with Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths. (Nice: an undersung masterpiece by a writer's writer.) He follows that up with by Pale Fire by Nabokov at #2. (Hm. Does he really think it's better than Lolita? Really?) Then with number 3 he goes straight off the reservation: Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini. (What? By who?) The whole exercise is an orgy of intellectual second-guessing, which as we all know is infinitely more fun than the first...
...Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Hamlet by William Shakespeare The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov Middlemarch by George Eliot
...some respects, the 13-year-old Hannibal reminds me of the young Humbert Humbert - hero, villain and narrator of Nabokov's Lolita. Each is a well-born lad cruising through an idyllic youth that is capsized when he is separated from the girl he loves. But whereas Humbert gets locked in a time warp, incapable of loving any female older than his childhood sweetheart Annabel Leigh, Hannibal transfers his love to Lady Murasaki. This knowing, generous woman has awakened the man in a boy, and the book's real suspense is not over whether Hannibal will find the killers...