Fiction

[Lhoffman]

Maar points out that the book is an arc, the first chapters rising into the Victor chapter, then falling in the chapters following.   The chapters that precede the Victor chapter are mirrored by those that follow it.   The Victor chapter is also an arc, mid-point focusing on the effect of curves on reflection, and reference to van Eyck's mirrors.

The chapter opens with Victor dreaming of a king's reflection in the highly polished surface of his desk.  The king is contemplating exile, an idea of leaving his country with the aid of a friend with a fast motorboat.   At the train station, the peasants are reflected in puddles from a recent rainstorm.   The chapter ends with Pnin's dream of escaping his own country, waiting with a friend for the arrival of a motorboat.   Outside Pnin's window, puddles from the recent rain reflect telephone wires.  (Trains, telephone wires similar as related to technology.)

[pugetopolis]

I'm going to check out the version in the New Yorker.

According to Boyd (“The American Years,” 696)—“Pnin” was written 1953-1955; pub. Serially in New Yorker (chap. 1, November 28, 1953; chap. 3, April 23, 1955; chap. 4, October 15, 1955; chap. 6, November 12, 1955); in book form, New York: Doubleday, 1957

[pugetopolis]

Who is V?

The magician aspect...this is the basis of Woods' book?

“Simple tricks, but hard
to follow.”—Michael Wood,
The Magician’s Doubts

What is a magician? Who is the magician? How many magicians are there? They all seem to constellate around the mysterious V.

Who is V? I keep asking myself that—and there’s always another V around the corner. I didn’t intend to read all of V’s novels & short stories—and get lost in the NABOKV-L labyrinth or maze of secondaire literature. But, well, it’s happened. I’ve succumbed to the magician’s art I suppose. I’m sucked into V—addicted to his performance art.

TRLOSK pretty much sketches out the magician’s technique for me—at least at that stage of his tricks. His fictional bios & fictional books—like I said earlier they remind me of a cabaret act. Or burlesque. Or drag-act. There’s no one “V” it seems to me—it’s more of a performance act, a performance art:

1 “I am Sebastian Knight. He is ‘impersonating’ Sebastian, that is, ‘acting Sebastian’, he is Sebastian-as-performance.”—The Magician’s Doubts 32

 2 “He is still the conjuror he remembers being as a child. ‘I loved doing simple tricks—turning water into wine, that kind of thing.’ Simple tricks, but hard
to follow.” —The Magician’s Doubts, 8

3 “There are hints that V is Sebastian in another sense; that he has made him up.” —The Magician’s Doubts, 53

4 “He speaks of ‘all these books that I knew as well as if I had written them myself’ (“Lost Property” etc.), perhaps because he has written them, or at least imagined them.” —The Magician’s Doubts, 53

5 “…and when Sebastian’s name is spelled with a v in a telegram’s transcription of its Russian spelling’—the narrator recognizes his own initial and ‘for some reason unknown’ goes into the bathroom and stands in front of the mirror for a moment.”—The Magician’s Doubts, 53

6 “Has V invented Sebastian, is Sebastian a fantasy, the fiction’s fiction?” —The Magician’s Doubts, 53

7 “The discovery V appears to make on the novel’s last page ’I am Sebastian Knight’—would then function as a double bluff. The man who is Sebastian confesses to impersonating him.”—The Magician’s Doubts, 53

8 “The v would represent, on the plane of accident or overdetermined narrative, the near-collapse or threat of collapse of the two selves into one; the tilt of the dream self back into the daily one.”—The Magician’s Doubts, 53

[Lhoffman]

Pnin....who is Victor's father?   Really, we only have the narrator's word that it's Wind.   And have we any reason to trust the narrator?

............

Was looking through Nabokov's Eugene Onegin today at my library.   Very amusing thing about this.   The ratio of commentary to poem seems similar to that in Pale Fire.

..................

I do have that Michael Wood book, but have gotten caught up in re-reads of the Nabokov's novels.

[pugetopolis]

Was looking through Nabokov's Eugene Onegin today at my library. Very amusing thing about this.   The ratio of commentary to poem seems similar to that in Pale Fire.

Interesting. Sort of like Kinbote’s Commentary in “Pale Fire”?

 

[pugetopolis]

I do have that Michael Wood book, but have gotten caught up in re-reads of the Nabokov's novels.

I’ve started some re-reading too. Michael Wood’s book begins with TRLOSK. Have re-read it again—and like it even more now. It’s like “Pnin”—slim, elegant and many books within one book. Making me wonder what Sebastian’s books were like, e.g. “The Pristine Bezel,” “The Doubtful Asphodel”  & the ‘fictional’ short stories like “The Funny Mountain.”

[Lhoffman]

Albinos in Black....evocative, no?   

I'm going to get through the Wood this week-end.

[pugetopolis]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1y3PC9EVuo&feature=related

Albinos in Black
By Sebastian Knight
New Directions, 1933

The telegram from Doctor Starov arrived at noon—I got to Paris as soon as possible. I took a train and waited anxiously outside his room—there in St. Damier Hospital. Only to find out later—that somebody else, a Monsieur Kegan, was dying in that room. And that Sebastian had died the previous day.

But not really—it was another strange, quixotic mix-up. Sebastian hadn’t died at all—he ended up back in Paris with a new nom de plume. Rewriting his “Albinos in Black”—with a new young lover from Tunis.

[pugetopolis]

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
By Vladimir Nabokov
New Directions, 1941

"The only real number
is one—the rest are
mere repetition."
—Sebastian Knight
TRLOSK

While perusing Amazon recently, I was very pleased to come across a copy of Sebastian Knight’s “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.” An original New Directions edition. And such a bargain too—only $1000.00!!! What a lucky find, what a steal—what a stroke of exquisite Nabokovian luck!!!

But little did I know—an even more stunning & electrifying find on the Internet awaited me. I was innocently sipping my latte in the Barnes & Noble café—playing around with my new “Nook” eReader. I hang out a lot in the University District—I like the wired ambience of all the young minds. And bodies…

And then, what a surprising & exhilarating experience! There it was on the screen of my iPad—just waiting for me! I’m such a selfish thing—I take up a whole table in the eCafe. For my secret “guilty pleasures” habit—perusing, browsing, buying “rare bad books” you know. And there it was—I just happened to stumble across it. Just waiting for me. An eBay treasure—worthy of a lifetime of searching for guilty pleasures. And only $1.98!!!

A rare find indeed—a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Albinos in Black” (New Directions, 1943). This lovely volume, as you perhaps know—contains three short stories: “The Funny Mountain,” “Albinos in Black” and “The Back of the Moon.”

[Lhoffman]

So have you loaded the free nook app onto your iPad?   I have it on my laptop, but haven't taken the laptop to the B&N.   I'm wondering if you can read for free instore with the app on your own computer.   

When I loaded the app onto my computer, I got a $50 from B&N.   Then bought a Nook for son and B&N gave me another $50.   Spent $149, got back $100....not a bad deal, eh?

 I didn't get through the Wood as planned, will read on the plane though and should get through a big chunk of it...3 hours home, I think.   Very much liked his writing on death and the writer in the preface.   Made me want to look more into Barthes.   I have only looked at his stuff on mythology.

[Lhoffman]

Reading Wood's commentary on Speak, Memory makes me think of this:

[pugetopolis]

Reading Wood's commentary on Speak, Memory makes me think of this:

Mostly just finishing up on Michael Maar’s “Speak, Nabokov” book. Going back over all the copious footnotes—and following his “Alice in Wonderland” rabbit-holes back into the main texts.

“Lolita,” for example. When does the Humbert confessional narrative—break off into its Gogolesque rant? When Lolita dies in the hospital room? It seems to me that’s where Humbert flips-out. And where Gogol-fantasy kicks in. The whole Quilty-double routine hinted at on the porch that night in faked-couplets in the Enchanted Hunters Lodge—it’s adroitly alluded to then. The rest of the novel after Lolita’s death in the hospital—an acting out of Humbert’s remorse, guilt-trips & pseudo-revenge on himself for losing her?

This kind of “unreliable narrative” approach is more cut & dried in “Pale Fire”—between Shade’s 999-line poem and Kinbote’s Commentary. Instead of thumbing back & forth—I actually bought another Vintage edition copy & did what Nabokov suggested. I sliced the book along the spine—into two books I could place side by side on my roll-top desk. And that way I could read thru both texts simultaneously & see how the one flowed into the other. On the left—Nabokov’s Shadean text. On the right—the Gogolesque “Queen of Zembla” outré text in all its fantastic marvelousness.

I even went to the Google book page—with its captured pages of Nabokov’s original New Directions edition of “Gogol.” I googled Gogol—ha ha. The style of a writer like Gogol is what counts, as Nabokov says.

But with “Pnin” and “Lolita”—there’s more of a ‘segue’ than ‘slice & dice’ if you know what I mean. The way Nabokov lets Gogol into the text—it’s very subtle and sly. Depending on how devilish or elitist he wanted to be. Or how much he wanted to create a chess problem for the reader. But then I realized something else…

After reading Maar on Proustian effects on Nabokov all the way up to “Ada” (his ultimate version of “In Search of Lost Time”)—I realized that this ‘slippage’ into the Gogolesque imagination was actually more like Proustian ‘involuntary memory’ at work. Perhaps it had nothing to do with what a writer starts out consciously to do—but rather in the middle of things a kind of coincidence happens with the subconscious?

The way, for example, Victor’s fantasy in “Pnin” first intrudes, then opens up & even enters his father’s dreamtime when the kid comes to visit him at Waindell College. To me this shared psychic connection is the sort of thing that haunts “Pale Fire” as well as “Lolita.” Boyd devotes several pages in “The American Years” of his biography to his Uncle Ruka dream that Vladimir had when his uncle died—with the two clowns in the dream having the same ‘cryptogrammic’ names as the director & producer of the later “Lolita” movie…

Bringing to pass the dream’s promise that young Vladimir’s inherited fortune would be his again sometime in the future. After losing it during the Russian Revolution. Which is exactly what happened—subsequently Nabokov retiring from Cornell teaching & devoting himself luxuriously & in style to writing fulltime in the Montreaux Palace Hotel. A photo of him sitting & writing on his index cards on a bench in front of the palatial hotel—it’s worth a million words.

There are other literary dream-sequences not dealt with in the NABOKV-L online archives—that I’ve been studying too. Thanks to Maar’s “Speak, Nabokov.” Victor in “Pnin,” for example. And the Siamese twin short story “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster” before “The Vane Sisters” story in “The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov” (1997).

[Lhoffman]

I've been re-reading his early works:  Mary; King, Queen, Knave; Glory.   Dream sequences and motifs factor into these, but to a lesser extent than in his later work.   What I'm seeing more frequently in these works is the image used in Speak, Memory of time folding in on itself, but image is presented in reverse. There's a sense in Mary and Glory of an unfolding carpet, the author carefully lifting each layer, peering in.

Glory takes on the aspect of the fairy tale more solidly than the earlier two novels.

[pugetopolis]

Montreaux Palace Hotel

Glory takes on the aspect of the fairy tale more solidly than the earlier two novels.

“A quarter of a mile along to the right, the promenade passes by the gardens of the Montreaux Palace Hotel. During the exceptionally mild fall of 1961, Nabokov had often sat on a bench there between hotel and lake, at the foot of a weeping cedar. With pencil poised above the stack of index cards that served as his portable desk, he would hesitate for a moment, san the mountains across the lake for another phrase to confer on Kinbote, and write on, in “one of the most enchanting and inspiring gardens I know.”—Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years

Maar says the same thing about the ‘fairy tale’ mode in action with some of Nabokov’s novels & short stories. All the way from Hans Christian Anderson to Lewis Carroll—writers like Nabokov & Mann seem to do that quite a bit. After all that’s when our imaginations are so intense—more than ready to flesh out the details of a mere storyline with incredible embellishments.

Maar gets into how Nabokov follows Mann’s dark versions of Hans Christian Anderson in Chapter Two “Magician and Dwarf.” The way both Mann & Nabokov update the fairy tales into modern myth is very interesting.

I can imagine Nabokov sitting on that bench in front of the Montreaux hotel—dreaming up new variations of his various fairy tale stories with a stack of index cards on his lap. In the garden—looking out over the lake…

[Lhoffman]

 

http://www.fairmont.com/montreux