/lit/ - Literature

>Dead Souls begins episodically, with a character-less man hopping from gross caricature to gross caricature trying to profit from a ridiculous legal loophole which Nabokov himself disregards as absurd. The book is sporadically funny, believe it or not, and between periods of tedium and gratuitous asides, possesses some amusing satire. But the book wallows in lazily vague generalizations (“and was on the point of returning a reply at least no worse than that which would have been returned, under similar circumstances, by the hero of a fashionable novelette”); sloppy disregard for detail (“How they contrive to be so God only knows.”); and, perhaps due to the translation’s fault, maddeningly overblown prose (“In short, dissatisfaction began to display itself on every feminine face.”) A lot of details are dismissed as being known by God only, a lot of characters act in ‘you know, that Russian way, meh.’ Frank O’Connor champions Gogol’s gratuitous use of generalization. I have no clue as to why.

Because he was satirising literature itself as much as the world about him?