/lit/ - Literature

>>18694645
Fuck you for making me actually pull this book off my shelf again because I know I'll just have to read it all over again. I'm looking at the notes and tabs I made when I last read it to see if I have anything to add.

First off, I read this book as halfway between a multilayered fantasy and a puzzle. It's obviously a puzzle with all the clues you've laid out, but it is not necessary that this puzzle was created to be solved. Nabokov was notably a big admirer of Joyce, who is recorded saying that part of his drive to write Ulysses was the knowledge that the language and references created a literary puzzle that could never be solved, ensuring that it would be discussed forever and affording the author a sort of immortality. I see this book as Nabokov's attempt to do the same. The book at times seems to be multiple people's fantasies: Shade's poem is a fantastic account of his own life, an impressionist memoir. Gradus' fantasy is that of continued revolution through the killing of Kinbote despite the fact that the Zemblan revolution has long since been won, Kinbote's fantasy is even more complex and indeterminate, reaching as far as him possibly inventing the other major characters of the play, and the fantasy we as readers play by pretending the book is anything more than text on a page. This last bit is best exemplified by the index preamble, which definitively lists the "main characters" of the book, pulling away the final veil that this could be anything more than a completely made up story.

Note in the index the circular referencing of the crown jewel's hiding place. This is a synecdoche of the whole book, where a mystery is laid that seems to promote cross-referencing but ultimately leaves us unsatisfied. Have to cook dinner now, I'll try to write more if I have a minute to come back.