/lit/ - Literature

[Keynes No.14987114]

Give me one acceptable reason as to why anyone with half a brain would consider any writer to ever be able to compete with Nabokov.

Nabokov is literally the epitome of everything that a writer should astrive to be - intellectually engaging, highly cultured, extremely well-read. Would put literally any and all of you /lit/ pseuds to shame.

[Anonymous No.14987116]

CUNNY haha

[Anonymous No.14987156]

>>14987114

[Anonymous No.14987350]

>>14987114
How is he highly cultured when he was the most snobbish and envious man in the literary world?

[Anonymous No.14987425]

>>14987114
Because Joyce is everything he is and more

[Anonymous No.14987442]

>>14987114
If only he put in the work to make psychologically complex characters rather than shallow plot structures to pin pretty sentences and superfluous exposition and trite wordgames on. I like his style in parts but he was extremely limited as a writer because he was too busy preening himself as an aesthete and a snob to care about the human world. Notice how all of the qualities you mentioned didn't take into account the actual quality of his works.

[Anonymous No.14987475]

Hey its that cool loli guy.

[Anonymous No.14987514]

Joyce easily BTFOs Nabokov. Faulkner as well.
>inb4 corncobby meme

[Anonymous No.14987824]

>>14987114
There is no way this wasn't a pedo, or hebephile or whatever you call it.
He writes like a straight up /tv/ cunnysiour.

[Anonymous No.14987965]

>>14987442
>psychological complex characters
Humbert and Lolita are highly complex, which you notice when you try to describe them. Their morals, their history, their desires and goals etc... The plot is for the most part believable depending on how much you trust the narrator.
>quality of his works
with what measurement do you measure quality? Nabokov mixes satire with tragedy. what is a good tragic satire? And most importantly, you have to ask yourself: are you not entertained?

[Anonymous No.14987967]

>>14987114
His actual writing is bad.

[Anonymous No.14987968]

the only thing engaging about any of nabokov's works is sex with a prepubescent

[Anonymous No.14987985]

Flaubert is better,
>>14987514
Faulkner has like 4 good books and a heap of shit.

[Anonymous No.14988063]

>>14987985
4 good books more than Nabokov.

[Anonymous No.14988067]

Because there are greater writers, e.g. Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Witold Gombrowicz, Jaroslav Hasek, Franz Kafka etc.

[Keynes No.14988085]

>>14988067
What are you talking about? I tried getting through Musil and I found it a stinky heap of unfiltered shit; Kafka is fine but doesn't come as close to the level of artistic ability that Nabokov has. Fuck you.

[Anonymous No.14988101]

You haven't read Proust

[Anonymous No.14988212]

>>14987114
>everything that a writer should astrive to be - intellectually engaging, highly cultured, extremely well-read
Writing good books is, interestingly, not mentioned here.

[Anonymous No.14988231]

>>14987114
Just started Lolita last night, actually looking forward to continuing with it so that's a very good sign. Genuinely found myself laughing at the "He is not a gentleman" line from the fake foreward framing segment

[Anonymous No.14988237]

>>14987114
bro did you just describe me?
nabokov is great too but he is mostly shilled because of his literary criticism and his skepticism in regards to established literary giants like dosto

[Anonymous No.14988252]

>>14987114
Why would I read some russian pervert who wrote a book about glorifying a literal pedophile? Stop forcing Vladimir „Age not on the clock, too old for my cock“ Nabakov on /lit/ and go back to /tv/, /mlp/, /co/ or wherever pedos hang out nowadays.

[Anonymous No.14988282]

>>14987350
>snobbish and envious man
Get me the based department, pronto.

[Anonymous No.14988321]

>>14987114
Nabokov has no masterpiece. He is a great writer, with great books, but he has no Ulysses, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote or In Search of Lost Time.

[Anonymous No.14988330]

>>14987114
Nabokov is so based. He knew dosto was midwit garbage, though I know some of you pseudointellectual peterson fanboys may disagree

[Anonymous No.14988386]

>>14988321
This, except that you should have added The Brothers Karamazov amongst those examples you named.

[Anonymous No.14988468]

>>14987965
Lolita is his most readable book, but even in terms of unreliable narration it has nothing on Ishiguro's best works, where every single detail hides an aspect of character. Nabokov spends too much time on meandering details. Currently I'm reading Speak, Memory and there are beautiful passages, but then he drops this long genealogical spiel about who knows how many family members and blatantly does not give a shit about the reader at that point since he doesn't do enough psychology groundwork for these characters to make us care about them (saying it is a parody of genealogical sections in other works does not exempt its boringness). He is so focused on showing off his photographic memory and all the random stuff he reads that he forgets that a better writer would pick and choose what he wants to convey to make the most important points mnemonically salient to the reader. How much of the travel scenes in Lolita do you actually remember right now? How much of the extraneous detail sticks to you? I like him as a writer but he was hopelessly limited and was in no way great, although if he swallowed his pride and muted his personal obsessions, he could have been much more.

Almost every single short story and play of Chekhov's, a writer he hated, exemplifies 'tragic satire' better than whatever Nabokov wrote.

[Anonymous No.14988478]

>>14988468
>saying it is a parody of genealogical sections in other works does not exempt its boringness

I've always hated the "it's supposed to be shit!" excuse. Literally the "I was only pretending to be retarded" meme.

[Anonymous No.14988490]

>>14988468
not sure if I'm convinced just yet, but you certainly got some solid points. I disagree, however on the travel scenes. all of his elements of romantic and anti-romantic americana stuck with me ever since. Comparing my reading experience with Kubrick's film adaption Lolita I found striking similarities, which advocates for Nabokov's strong, clear, and rememberable descriptions.

[Anonymous No.14988532]

>>14988490
>I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects--paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges

This is an example I can think off of good writing mixed with fluff. A small example but it exemplifies my issue with him. The end that peters out into a poetic rumination of memory is nice, but does Nabokov need to specify everything about "paleopedology and Aelion Harps" and all the random exposition? By itself it would be no problem, but this issue is multiplied across all his books across many paragraphs. One could argue Humbert is a loquacious character, so it fits here, but since it manifests in everything he ever wrote, it is an issue of the author, not the narrator. Ada is pretty much his worst tendencies taken to an extreme. Despite being a disciple of Flaubert, Nabokov was far from being able to conjure 'le mot juste'. And, unlike Dostoyevsky or Tolstot, he does not make up for his unwieldiness with a sense of scale and psychological scope. Nabokov was a pretty good curator of literary museums, but not a society.

[Anonymous No.14988549]

>>14988532
>"paleopedology and Aelion Harps"
probably a shit and fart joke of some sort

[Anonymous No.14988559]

>>14987116
fpbp

[Anonymous No.14988561]

>>14988237
hallo? based department?

[Anonymous No.14988572]

>>14988237
Stanislaw Lem wrote a very good takedown of Borges, called Unitas Oppositorium, even though he admitted to liking the best short stories.

[Anonymous No.14988585]

>>14988572
Redpill me about Lem's takedown.

[Anonymous No.14988594]

100% style 0% substance, he just tries way too hard

[Anonymous No.14988609]

>>14988585
He said Borges' best stories were like perfect maths problems but he was part of an old culture whose ideas were hopelessly outdated and could not compare to the complexities of a new and constantly evolving science. Honestly, having read a couple Lem books, his stuff is way smarter than Borges' philosophical-mystical thought experiments. His Master's Voice, the Golem Lectures, Solaris etc... are idea bombs of heavier weight than the Labyrinths.

[Anonymous No.14988702]

>>14988252
No one:

Nobody:

Absolutely not a single soul:

/lit/ basedposters: NABAKOV IS LE PEDOPHILE LEL HAHA

[Anonymous No.14988709]

>>14988101
This right here.

[Anonymous No.14988752]

>>14988609
>>14988609
His criticism is that Borges is too traditionalist and too well-read. You halfwits really consider that a good "takedown"?

[Anonymous No.14988787]

>>14988572
lmao

>>14988609
double lmao
lem was obviously an utter hack, triggered by Tarkovsky improving upon his novel, triggered by Borges being a far better writer in a similar field
just imagine, criticising a writer because he's not up to date enough, as if literature's job is running after the newest trends in science and tech, and not exploring the eternal questions

>>14988702
and you can slit your wrists and fuck off to you-know-where with your cancer

[Anonymous No.14988796]

>>14988787
you're the cancer.

[Anonymous No.14989739]

>>14987985
Still beats Nabokov by 2 good books, and even then Pale Fire is the only one that can really contend with Faulkner

[Anonymous No.14989764]

>>14988468
>A writer he hated
What?
http://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations

[Anonymous No.14989784]

>>14987114
Nabokov himself would've disagreed with this, he believed Joyce to be his superior.
>>14987116
>>14987475
>>14987824
>>14988702
I believe Vlad was like me in that he knew it's wrong but just can't help himself.

[Anonymous No.14990202]

>>14989739
Pnin is good and Ada is GOAT.