/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11504571]

Which of his English works do i read now that I've finished Lolita? Is anything else of his this good? I read the briefs in that back and these seem interesting to me:

Pnin
Speak, Memory
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Strong Opinions
Transparent Things
Look at the Harlequins!
Ada or Ardor

also discuss Nabokov's prose and the great piece of art that is Lolita

[Anonymous No.11504594]

Pale Fire

[Anonymous No.11504629]

Pale Fire

[Anonymous No.11504704]

>>11504571
Pnin and Transparent Things are good, besides Pale Fire. Ada has beautifully written prose at times but is also overall a dull, tedious, disappointing, overlabored slog. None of the emotional impact and directness of Lolita. The main characters (Van and Ada) are mostly extremely pretentious and unlikable. Nabokov had his philosophy of being an aesthete and not caring about making sympathetic characters and it’s consistent and respectable, yes, but that doesn’t mean the reader can’t be bored and annoyed by characters.

Pnin is surprisingly straightforward and feelsy for Nabokov. It’s a relatively un-experimental novel, written in his trademark beautiful and meticulous prose about a naive Russian expatriate, Pnin, who becomes a professor in America. Transparent Things is a beautiful, enigmatic, and underrated piece by him. It’s relatively short (about 100 pages) and thus ends up having a strangely different feel from his other longer novels. Definitely worth the read if you want to really probe Nabokov’s artistry beyond his major and most well-known pieces.

Pale Fire, as others are saying, is also another major great book by Nabokov. This is him, I think, at peak experimentation. It’s the most experimental of his works, written as a poem and as a long commentary to this poem. Here he satirically touches on academia (academics projecting their own mindsets and bizarre psychological intepretations onto authors), on the theme of exile from one’s homeland (Kinbote missing Zembla like Nabokov lost the Russia of his childhood), intersubjectivity, and artistic/literary originality. The book is also an extended, tragicomic, Hamlet-esque meditation on death. Some people find it to be particularly cold and overly cerebral but I found it a moving book with a lot of heart despite the convoluted metafiction.

[Anonymous No.11504729]

Symbols and Signs

[Anonymous No.11504762]

>>11504704
>Ada has beautifully written prose at times but is also overall a dull, tedious, disappointing, overlabored slog. None of the emotional impact and directness of Lolita.
I've just started it and that's how it seems to me. There were some embarrassing low-rent Finnegans Wake jokes too. Is the theme of incest explored in some interesting way?

[Anonymous No.11504809]

>>11504704
>The main characters (Van and Ada) are mostly extremely pretentious and unlikable.
wHew

[Anonymous No.11504822]

>>11504704
Wow thank you for such an in-depth explanation. I think i'll end up picking up Transparent Things and Pale Fire, the latter of which interests me most by the themes you say it contains.

[Anonymous No.11504844]

>>11504571
Honestly Speak, Memory was my second favorite novel of his behind Lolita. Honestly the best auto-biography I have read. If you love his prose and appreciate Nabokov, you owe it to yourself to read it. I read it after Pnin, pale fire, ada or adore and think it's better then any of them. Pale fire is an interesting gimmick. Pnin is mildly interesting. Ada or adore is very long in contrast to how concise his other works were and I do believe it over stays it's welcome.

[Anonymous No.11505256]

>>11504571
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. It's fucking superb, and of such a different style than Lolita.

[Anonymous No.11505267]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3fsSL4Bw9w
anyone know what book he's talking about in this vid at like 1:45

[Anonymous No.11505278]

I’m hoping Pale Fire is as good as Lolita. I teared up at the end of Lolita because it was so good

[Anonymous No.11505490]

To add on to the support for Pale Fire--it's my favorite novel. So, so many wonderful lines and passages. Its exploration of the mutability of space and time and the nature of randomness, chaos, structure, and patterns was very interesting and complex to me.

[Anonymous No.11507163]

>>11505267
Lolita

[Anonymous No.11507207]

you didnt include kuzhin's defense because you're not interested?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defense
similar themes as dr faustus, chess novella and glass bead game

[Anonymous No.11508947]

>>11505267
Wow thanks for sharing this
>>11507207
Noted

[Anonymous No.11508998]

>>11507207
OP asked for his English works. His best Russian work is «Дap» (The Gift).

[Anonymous No.11509062]

>>11505267
whats the year of the docu? older than 1974?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Original_of_Laura
different title but "texture of time" seems relevant and it's an index cards sketch