After finishing Don Quixote, I could only graze. I tried Woolf’s diaries, Montaigne via Bakewell, Bernhard’s memoirs, Crystal’s history of English. I returned to Borges. Nothing held. Each voice called for a different rhythm. I read in hour-long bursts, distracted, unsure which thread to follow.
Then Nabokov.
I opened Lectures on Literature and found myself stopped. Not by argument, but by focus. He writes: “In reading, one should notice and fondle details.” The way he refuses to excuse a reader’s inattention; every detail must be questioned and visualised, down to the arrangement of a railway carriage in Tolstoy, which Nabokov redraws from memory to prove that most readers never saw it clearly.
To minor authors is left the interpretation of the commonplace… The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing… because minor readers like to recognise their own ideas in a pleasing disguise.
That sentence stings. But it also clarifies. Reading is not a kind of recognition but a study of something newly made. “The work of art is invariably the creation of a new world,” and that world, like any world, must be entered on its own terms.
>Vladimir is just the professor to call attentions to one's inadequacies as a reader.Oh my, yes. It's almost terrifying, isn't it? This description of minor writers and readers is almost—almost—enough to make me want to crawl in a hole and never pick up a book again. The inadequacy!
>Nicole – Those fortunate Cornell students that were taught by Professor Nabokov were, I imagine, either broken or set up for a lifetime's devotion to literature.I have read Madame Bovary twice but fail to recall the colour of Emma's eyes. I would have incurred Nabokov's disdain.
>I had a prof (now a Russian scholar and Nabokv specialist!) who took this class. He told us about an extra-credit question on the final, about what some of the characters in Mansfield Park had for breakfast.Onw quibble, though – there's no ivory tower here, Cornell aside. This is Nabokov telling us how to read Nabokov novels. This is the view from the trenches.
>Amateur Reader – I love that story about Mansfield Park; I read something similar about the wallpaper in Anna Karenina.Quibble accepted; all Nabokov novels come alive on rereading.