Quote:
|
Originally Posted by gmku
Finishing up TRANSPARENT THINGS. What the hell was this about, Vlad? LOL.
|
His powers did wane over time, and this is probably his least satisfying work, or would have been if Original of Laura had remained unpublished. But I seem to remember some mind-blowing bit about a pencil in a drawer.
But about time he wrote a dud. Since the mid-1920s (!!) he'd been pouring out some of the most delightful fiction my eyes have ever read.
His first novel, Mary, is a bit slight, but a good intro to his themes. (He spent five decades writing about the same four or five things, which isn't a criticism, just a description).
Then begins an impressive streak of finely-woven fiction fun, little bursts of pleasure coming in at 250 pages or less. Some are better than others, but all are good.
Invitation to a Beheading, Despair and
The Defense are common favorites of the period.
His Russian phase ends with
The Gift, which ranks among his best work. But it is dense, and reveals its pleasures slowly and only to patient readers. It doesn't have much of the immediate joy which shimmers off the others.
He switched to English and wrote two more short, great ones
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and
Bend Sinister, then
Lolita. The book is long, diffuse, and grows a little tedious halfway through. It's a grand summation, which has its value, but I usually prefer all the earlier stuff he was summing up.
Pnin is a classic, and is very touching, a quality that can be somewhat rare in Nabokov.
Pale Fire is, in my lowly opinion, the best novel he wrote.
After an amazing start,
Ada runs out of steam, and so does Nab's career.
Look at the Harlequins is okay, but a slightly younger Nab would've crushed it.
His short story collection is a desert island pick, and if a wave threatened to wash away all my choices, this might be the one I'd save. It's packed with everything that made him great, and contains some new tricks he wasn't able to pull off in novels.
His only goal was to give a certain type of reader a rollicking good time, and I think he succeeded many times over. But yeah, he fucking blew it with this one.