Lectures on Literature

Bellissimi saggi tratti dalle lezioni universitarie di Nabokov su "Mansfield Park", "Casa desolata" (è stato proprio questo saggio a farmelo scoprire), Madame Bovary" (dove si distrugge il mito del cosiddetto realismo flaubertiano) e altri capolavori della letteratura europea.

Update: finished and I must say the format is not good.

All of the lectures would be much better if we could just take Nabokov’s personal copies of the books he chose and see what he has circled, underlined, highlighted, and written in the margins.

Otherwise the lectures read like massive blocks of quotes. (Except Ulysses which reads more like SparkNotes)

And sometimes I felt that Nabokov was trying to tell me there is only one right way to read, and that he made fun of all other ways, but I think there are many reasons to read and I’m not going to limit myself. I don’t like being told what to do even when by Nabokov. (One reason I like to read, a reason he would find juvenile, is to gauge my reactions to the reading and to therefore know more about myself.)

But there were things I liked too:

• how he isn’t discovering anything I can’t discover ; the way he breaks down style and structure is a conscious act but if pressed to say what differentiates a Proustian sentence from any other one, I would say the same

• how he encourages reading by gauging the tingles down our spine

• oh many many many things. That’s why I keep it 5 stars despite the shortcomings.

***
I just started it today so obviously I haven’t finished it yet but I feel I’m having the most delightful discussion with the most honest and intelligent person in the WORLD.

Oh... this book was amazing. It's not an easy read if you haven't read the books that he's discussing, and even if you have read them in the past, it's a little dry to read about the structural aspects of Bleak House six years after you've read Bleak House (that said, I've never read "The Metamorphosis" but I had no problems getting through that section). But that's just the bits and pieces of this. What this book really boils down to is a discussion of Nabokov's feelings about reading, about how to be a good reader, about what it means to really ingest a book.

My favorite moment in the book is when he talks about how the only way to really read a book is with your back - meaning that if a book doesn't make you feel something between your spine, give you a little tingle, then you aren't really reading anything worthwhile. What a brilliant idea.

And finally, we must remember that, "In reading, we must notice and fondle the details."

I was reading some of Goethe's poetry the other day and came across the fantastic and devastating "Erlkönig." I vaguely recalled having encountered the poem previously while feverishly digging my way through Nabokov's oeuvre. In the poem, an Elf King attempts to wrest a young boy from the warm embrace of his father's arms while the father remains entirely aloof to the Elf King's presence. Thematically the poem fits well with Lolita, so I started my search there.

While scouring Alfred Appel's annotations I came across a number of notes discussing references in Lolita to works by Joyce which I had never quite picked up on before. In this series of notes, Appel lays out Nabokov's distaste for Joyce's Finnegans Wake and his sheer admiration of Ulysses and again, as with Kafka and many others, we get a direct denial of any potential Joycean influence on Nabokov's body of work. We are told that though Nabokov had met Joyce relatively early on in his career (some time in the 1930's) - Nabokov did not get around to reading Joyce until the expiration of his Russian period, after which, he assures us, he had already matured as a writer to the point of being immune to outside influence.

These notes and a burbling fascination with the Nabokovian/Joycean interplay brought me back to this title, Lectures on Literature, and in particular the 80-plus page essay on Ulysses. This compact guide to Joyce's most famed work is pure gold. It may not exactly be the best beginners guide to Ulysses but this lecture provides serious illumination to the moderately well-versed Ulysses reader. The best part of Nabokov's analysis (which is actually more like a carefully constructed retelling or reconstructed telling of the novel's plot) has to due with the articulation of Joyce's minor themes. Doing some serious heavy lifting as reader, Nabokov chases down the progress of a number of minor items as they pop in and out of view throughout the entire day chronicled in Ulysses. He discusses the importance of the lemon scented soap that travels from pocket to pocket in Bloom's suit throughout the day, he charts the progress of a cloud that passes over Stephen and Bloom in the morning, he follows a crumpled pamphlet as it bobs down the Liffey marking time throughout various chapters, he articulates the content of a dream shared by Stephen and Leopold the night before the action of the book and how that dream prophetically shapes the nature of the two characters' reaction to one another later that day, and much more.

Depending on your tastes in literature this collection of lectures may offer to you what it has offered to me - a chance to discuss several of your favorite authors (Kafka, Proust, Joyce) and their greatest works of literature with another one of your favorite authors. I cherish this opportunity and find it well worth the rare five-star rating.

Before I finish, please give me a couple more lines to finish what I started and get back to Goethe. It turns out the Erlkonig reference didn't play out in Lolita exactly how I thought it would. Quilty, and not Humbert, ends up playing the part of Goethe's Elf King - Humbert himself in fact bestows upon Quilty the nickname "heterosexual Erlkönig." This casting of characters grants us a reading of Goethe's poem which features the ever self-assured Humbert Humbert in the tragic role of the young boy's father - this presents a tragicomic reading of the poem that only Nabokov could devise.

As a last note, "Erlkönig" also makes an appearance in Pale Fire where John Shade actually cops an entire line from the poem and incorporates it into his own final work. But that's quite off topic.

In conclusion, read Nabokov's Lectures on Literature because of Goethe's "Erlkönig."

Per me è stata una cosa lunga, ma in realtà la scrittura è molto scorrevole e non mi è parso pesante. Chiaramente, i concetti da assimilare sono tanti ed è comunque una lettura che richiede una certa attenzione.
Non è eccessivamente tecnico, ma resta il fatto che bisogna quantomeno avere un’idea delle opere che tratta (soprattutto per Tolstoj, dato che Anna Karenin è il materiale su cui Nabokov si masturbava).

I found this book outside a bar. I didn't realize it would change the way I read. Firstly, John Updike's intro is a minor masterpiece in and of itself. Secondly, Vladimir Nabakov's avuncular course on European lit (and reading in general) is a masterclass. It's true, the belabored recapping of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park can be a drag, but it's worth it for the ways he guides you through a story and points out what works and what doesn't. The introductory essay, "Good Readers and Good Writers," radically supposes that there are bad readers (and ofc there are).

I made the mistake of trying to start and finish James Joyce's Ulysses—one of the many titles discussed—before completing Lectures on Literature and thus my ability to offer concrete details on the book is clouded by the distance that that inadvisable suicide mission created. What I remember is feeling smarter, like a more adept reader, while following the thread of a plot on the same rocking chair as a master knitter himself. Not only that, but Nabokov is funny. Laugh out loud funny. I found him entertaining and clever; serious and studied, but also snide and sneering. I loved it.

At first I was wary of this book, being a former grad student and current exile from the literary academy with no interest in rejoining those stale debates. But what a breath of fresh air it proved to be. Nabokov was, not surprisingly, a keen reader, and he brings all his technical prowess to bear on works from Dickens, Austen, Flaubert, and others. He has the gift of entering a work on its own terms and bringing it to life, not deadening it with some inane theory. I read these lectures alongside the books they describe, and I found them delightfully illuminating.

El análisis de Dickens y Austen es muy bueno