/lit/ - Literature

>>11213449
I've read three of his books: Lolita; Bend Sinister; and The Eye. And I've read some of his poetry.

Lolita was the best thing I've read by him. I tried to read Ada, or Ardor once and couldn't get into it. The language was rough and super pretentious, the world he was trying to build was impossibly vague, and the characters were boring and unimaginative. I put it away after a couple chapters.

Bend Sinister was terrible. A shabby critique of Soviet politics told from the perspective of a philosophy professor when it's clear that Nabokov knows little about philosophy. His attempt to communicate ideas on metaphysics was embarrassingly bad. And the book was corny.

His poetry is yuck. And The Eye was a funny, nice novella, but not great.

On the whole, Nabokov had a lot of good moments. Lolita is by far his best work. But his pretentiousness and narcissism ruins most of his stuff. He is an example of a man who thinks good writing means using obscure words that nobody knows. He is the kind of guy who thinks he is smart because he knows an out-of-use latinate word like "illachrymable" or because he wrote a Russian word in English like "baba" or because he wrote a whole page in French! Wow!

From his interviews you could tell he was a total fraud. He never spoke anything spontaneously. He literally read his own pre-made writings. He create an original sentence on the spot. In order for him to make something quasi-pretty he had to spend time dictionary-swimming. He's the kind of dude with a dictionary open while he writes looking for weird words to include in his works. It's so yuck and so obvious.

His best moments were when he put all that affectation aside and wrote with simple, unfeigned prose that actually came from his heart. No simulacrum, no mental masturbation, and no ugly old words. It wasn't plebeian, it wasn't pretentious. It was the right balance. Some of Lolita is like that.