Nabokolia

5 Years Ago Ada and I started blogging our way through Vladimir Nabokov’s bibliography. Reading Ardor, which was specifically focused on our reading of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. That turned into a much larger project, Nabokolia. It’s hard to believe that 5 years has passed. In that time my sister and I have read and blogged our way through 8 of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, as well as a larger number of his shorter fiction works. We’ve been lucky enough to have been listed on The Millions Top Literary tumblrs, on at least TWO different occasions. We’ve corresponded with esteemed literary critic and scholar Brian Boyd. We’ve enjoyed every bit of it. Sadly though, we’ve come to a bit of an ending. 

My darling sister and I both find ourselves busy with those other non-literary parts of our life: family, friends, work, etc. This is not to say that we’re saying goodbye to our beloved Uncle Vladimir Nabokov. He shall always be with us. And we still have many of his books to look forward to. I have no plans to delete this blog, so the archive is still available for anyone who cares enough to go back and read through our various commentaries and reviews. 

I have enjoyed every moment of this blog. It’s been a place where I can nerd out and discuss one of my favourite novelists of all time. And it’s also allowed my sister and I to communicate with each other across the country. It’s provided a way for us to stay in touch. And I am forever grateful for that. I love my darling sister and this has been a wonderful adventure. We also want to thank anyone and everyone who has liked, faved, retweeted, retumblrd, and/or shared this journey with us. 

And thanks to Vladimir Nabokov for writing those lovely words.

Forever Yours,

Death.

Dreaming of the past.

Colleagues, friends, servants kidnapped by the State.

A discussion of how to improve Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 

Confrontation with Toad.

The university faculty are assembled at the president’s house. The president is desperate to save the university by convincing the Ruler that their institution will not operate against the new political dogma. The president asks those in attendance to sign a document to this effect and then asks Krug to deliver it to the Ruler because he and the Ruler had been schoolmates at one time.

Prez: Krug, please use your relationship with the Ruler to save the university.

Krug: I don’t think that’ll work

P: Why in Hades not? You were boyhood chums, weren’t you?

K: I kinda used to pick on the guy

P: How bad?

K: I called him Toad and sat on his face.

P: Well, boys will be boys.

K: I did it a lot. Like every day, for five years.

P: Any chance he might be over it?

K: He’s making everyone call him the Ruler. What do you think?

P: Can you at least sign the document?

K: No, but I’ll correct your grammar.

P: Hey, isn’t your wife dead?

K: Maybe. Maybe not. I bet you didn’t know that I’m wearing purple socks under my boots.

P:??

K: Time to go. Jeeves! Bring the car around.

Jeeves: My name is Alexander, and I’m not your chauffeur.

K: I remember well what you are, a youthful victim of capitalism, communism, and masturbation, now drive me home.

This was a good chapter. Funny, you know? I agree with Van in that this seems to be a darker soviet version of Pnin. And on that note, I’d like to declare that no one writes a complicated curmudgeon like Nabokov.

Love,

It took long enough, six chapters into Bend Sinister, and I finally find myself wanting to finish this book. It might be because Krug is finally doing things. Up until now Krug has largely found himself being acted upon. So much of the novel has taken place within Krug’s mind, his past memories, his dreams, the fictional recesses where he is plagued by nightmarish thoughts. 

A very interior novel and one I am not sure I am enjoying. For me, it always comes back to the fact that Nabokov is a writer that (at least in my mind) is always refining, tuning, and working. Each novel I read feels like a reworking of an earlier novel. Nabokov is practising his writing. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a draft for Ada, in the same way that Bend Sinister is a draft for Pnin, and Mary is a lesser Lolita and so on. 

This is not a complaint, merely an observation (though one you may feel free to disagree with). I guess, all writers do this kind of work, this exercise in refinement. I wonder what my darling sister might think about this particular idea of mine. 

After reading chapter three of Bend Sinister I find myself grasping for emotions not quite within my reach. I want to feel Krug’s pain as he tucks his little boy in for the night and assures him, tenderly and falsely, that his mother is well and will be home soon. I almost feel it, but Krug isn’t quite a person to me yet. He’s still a character, the Protagonist. He is Krug. A single flat syllable.

Krug banters with incompetent sentries, finds a quiet dignity in taking the stairs when the lift is not functioning, and takes his grim supper in silence sitting across from the distraught nanny . He calls his friend and asks him to handle Krug’s wife’s cremation and funeral arrangements because Krug cannot bear it. Krug plans to take his son away to the country in the morning, but then Krug once again leaves his flat in the dangerous dark hours, joining a bizarre carpool with his fellow academics to the the home of the President of the university where they teach. They need a strategy for survival in this time of political instability where the pursuit of knowledge may not be a crime, not yet, but is certainly regarded as suspicious.

Perhaps this sense of distance, a numbing of what I know I should feel, is all part of Uncle Nab’s desired effect. The muffling wool of grief. I believe it is too early to say, but I shall continue reading, in search of Krug.

Love,

From The Guardian: 

Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges were all in the running for the 1965 Nobel prize for literature, newly opened archives have revealed, but the judges that year went instead for the controversial choice of Mikhail Sholokhov.

Poor Uncle Nabokov. Still, some solace to be had in knowing that the company you keep is of the highest quality. Neruda and Borges are arguably two of the most talented and fascinating writers in the world. To be considered is still an honour. 

Our story begins with a God’s eye view of an autumnal world contained in a shrinking puddle. Krug, an educated man, watches the sunset from his dying wife’s hospital window. Like the reflective puddle, Krug is contained and incrementally devastated by the dying of the light.

As I read, I am struck by a single image in prose form “...the visible emotion of a tree is the mass of its leaves...” But a few leaves remain on the gnarled poplar, enough to indicate that Krug is still human, still reactive, yet aware of the impending emotional winter. His wife will die (or has already died, I am not sure), and Krug weeps as he leaves the hospital after dark.

From there we are given some background. There’s been a political coup of sorts. Martial law is in effect and while Krug has written permission to cross the bridge after dark, the guards posted on the North bank are illiterate. They allow Krug to pass after a dim but affable grocer vouches for him. Unfortunately the North bank guards neglect to sign Krug’s pass and the South bank guards are sticklers for properly completed paperwork. They will not allow Krug to pass. This bureaucratic folderol, annoying as it is, gives Krug a brief respite from the weight of sorrow he carries in his pockets. Finally, he and the grocer make it to the South side of town. Krug finds comfort in his sense of intellectual superiority, while the grocer rejoices in the advent of a brave new world wholly populated by dullards.

Krug is adrift in a rough sea of grief and revolution. As a reader I feel similarly disoriented, but Uncle Nabs respects readers, and I know I am in good hands.

Reading on...

Love,

1. Have you ever stolen a book? If you’ve never stolen a book, go ahead and skip down to question 3.

Yes.

2. What books have you stolen, and under what circumstances did you take the book? (e.g. did you outright steal the book from a place of commerce, did you pilfer it discreetly from a relative, did you borrow it from a dear friend and never return it, etc.)

Too many to count. I used to work at a book store and I had access. It was my small way of rebelling against ‘the man’ and the corporate CEO that I disliked who owned the book store company I worked for. I was somewhat discreet and yet at the same time brazen. At the end of each shift, our manager would ask us to open our bags and she’d peek in a half-hazard way. I never fully understand this particular ‘going through the motions’ type of security. For one, everyone that worked in that book store was a voracious reader and so all of us were constantly reading. It was not too difficult to simply slide in a book or two into our bags each and every day. I no longer work at this book store and I no longer steal in such a manner. I’ve since moved my pilfering onto a more digital platform. For one, it’s less risky, and another it’s just so easy and convenient. A few clicks and I have the entirety of John Steinbeck on my iPad. If you knew me in the years of 2005-2009 and you received a birthday or X-mas gift, chances are high that you are the recipient and party to my crime. 

3. Do you intend to lie or misrepresent yourself on this survey?

Maybe, I have yet to read through all the questions. Only time will tell. 

4. Did you find question 3 to be a little belligerent in its tone?

Not belligerent, more presumptuous. 

4a. Do we have your permission to publish your survey results?

I stole this off of Biblioklept.org, it seems to be a rather old questionnaire. So this question is rather pointless. I should delete it but whatever. 

5. If someone attractive, at a party or social event, let’s say, was to ask you who your favorite author is, what would you say?

Vladimir Nabokov.

6. Who is your favorite author?

Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Franz Kafka, Charles de Lint, Guy Gavriel Kay, Frank Herbert, J.R.R. Tolkien. It probably depends on my mood. I have so many favourites. 

7. What is your favorite book?

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Dune by Frank Herbert, and Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. A three way tie. All three of these books significantly shaped my childhood and my life long love of reading. 

8. Please list any books you’ve bought because they might look impressive on your coffee table or bookshelf.

Europe: A History by Norman Davies, Odysseus Unbound by Robert Bittlestone.

9. Do the remnants of your shambolic youth taste like batteries in your mouth?

They taste less like batteries and more like stale Dr. Pepper that was left in the fridge over-night and drunk on an early Saturday morning while watching cartoons. 

10. Are you neurotypical or do you somewhat suffer?

I suffer greatly. 

11. In a fit of rage or despair, have you shattered a mirror or mirrors with your hands, cutting up your hands badly, getting blood on a favorite t-shirt (possibly ruining said shirt)? And if so, how far along are you into your seven year cycle of bad luck, and how has the bad luck manifested in your life?

No, but I have punched a hole in a wall with my fist. I have a tiny scar on my right hand to prove it too. 

12. What is your wpm when drunk on whiskey drinks?

When I’m drunk on whiskey, I care not for computers or screen. I only care about the friends or family members who are close to me. That and cheese. I love cheese when I’m drunk. Even when I’m not drunk. I mostly just love cheese. But whiskey is great. Sister and I have had many conversations about our mutual love of all things whiskey. 

13. When you were a child were you plagued by recurring nightmares that miniature werewolves in torn blue jeans were slowly nibbling all the flesh from your toes as if they were Maine lobsters (your toes, here likened to said lobsters, not the werewolves), nightmares that were attended by actual somatic tingling of the extremities, and possible bedwetting?

These questions are highly specific. To answer your question. No. My nightmares were usually focused on a sense of falling or being trapped in a box. I do not do well in confined spaces for long periods of time. I’m ok in the short while but anything more than an hour and I start to become a bit antsy and tense. Long International flights are nightmares. 

14. Can you recall when, as a young child, your now-deceased dear departed grandpa would cradle you gently and firmly in his arthritic clutch, his gnarled fingers inexplicably pink and yellow and purple and green and throbbing, his tired blood pulsing in tight, dry notches through those crumpled crooks; how he would gently sway you and hum and hum nonsense, soft murmurs distracting you from the fact that mother is still not home, can you please, now, recall?

I did not grow up with my grandparents. There are only a handful of times that I was able to spend time with them. I do recall having a snowball fight with my Grandpa and my Grandma cutting apples for me in the kitchen. 

15. Is it ever okay to eat large amounts of cold sour cream directly from the plastic container, perhaps with a large metal spoon, and if it is ever okay to do such a thing, when is that time?

No, it is never ok to do this. I mean you need some food as a vehicle for the cream. A spoon with just cold sour cream is too intense, but if you’re heaping it onto a slice of bread or a potato chip of some kind, then you are in the clear. 

16. When watching a movie intended to horrify hormonal teenagers, you identify most with:

a)      the bitch who goes crazy and screams and loses it and ends up dying b)      the track coach who is a bully in an early scene but just fucking wait, he’ll get his c)      the monster’s mother d)      the bitch who sold you the popcorn

c.

17. Isn’t this a lucky number?

No.

18. Would you rather admit that you were wrong to your gloating parent figure or would you rather me come to your house, steal some of your socks, molest your buttons, hold you down and brush your teeth, horseplay with your pets in a fashion too rough for their delicate bodies, etc?

Can’t I have both?

19. Where is the keen sense of adventure that once percolated in your heart, fomenting in your innards, rushing in torrents of passion from your eyes, ears, nose, throat, anus, etc.?

It’s right behind my left knee. I need only tickle it to set it free. 

20. How many books do you claim to have read?

I would guestimate some where in the 500+. 

21. Does it worry your brow and brain that each day, even today, every moment, this passing moment in fact, even as you waste time reading this, all these times, yes!–even now, here, you are closer now than before to approaching death?

I once remarked to a an ex-gf of mine that every page we turn is a page closer to death. As I have aged into my mid-30s, I can safely say, “Yes, I do worry about this.” 

22. How often do machines disappoint you?

Shhh, they’re watching and listening and learning. 

22a. I remember I had an interesting experience a few years back, which I will now try to relate to you. I was working for a horrible corporation that hired young English speakers to “teach” conversational English to native Japanese speakers. I was living in Tokyo, Japan at the time. It’s important to better understand this story for you to know that at the time my brown pair of shoes was a pair of Clark’s Wallabees, dark brown leather, a replacement pair really for a lighter, beigeish (sp?) suede pair that I had loved and worn the fuck out of, so to speak, in my college days. There is a certain way to lace these shoes that makes them so fucking comfortable (it’s unbelievable!), but unfortunately, at the time I was living in Tokyo I had the new brown pair and had somehow (and I can’t remember how) undone the good, comfortable lacing set-up and the new set-up was painful—and I mean it fucking hurt to walk in those things. It was unpleasant. So and so you should also know that this guy, J_____, who I knew, had actually fixed my previous, beig(e?)ish Wallabees a few years prior to this, when for some reason, drunk on a cruise ship I had taken the laces out, and this guy J_____ showed me how to lace them properly (taught a man to fish, so to speak). But, frustrated and perhaps overworked and mayhap a little frazzled I couldn’t remember how to re-lace these newer brown leather Wallabees, and my feet were fucking killing me! But so here’s what happened: See: there was this kid of about twelve years who came to the English school that I worked at, who happened to have the Down’s. And because he was Downsy, some of my colleagues were uncomfortable with teaching him the conversational English. But so see that didn’t really bother me at all, in fact he was a nice kid, and though I don’t recall his name, he was nice and it was never a bad time to be in there with him, and to speak to him in English, and sometimes he might even speak a few words of English too, mostly animals and colors, because my major technique with him, my strategy so to speak, was to bring crayons and paper and pictures of animals and basic things, objects, and to like, draw the objects and have him draw the objects and say the names of the animals and objects and things and also the names of the colors of all the animals and objects and things, and most of the time this technique or strategy seemed to work out okay and besides his parents mostly seemed to want for him to do things, you know, he didn’t really need to learn conversational English (which I’m not really sure you can really learn anyway), it was more like horseback riding lessons or guitar lessons or ikebana or something for him, and for the most part I think everyone, his parents and my colleagues and the Japanese staff, and the pair of us, everyone that is, was okay with us just coloring and saying “red” and “egg” and so forth. But so and then anyway this one day one of my colleagues who didn’t particularly care to spend time, paid or otherwise, with this Down’s kid, this colleague asked if I would, you know, swap with her and could I go please give the kid his lesson? So I went into the Spartan little cubicle to chat with old Downsykins. Anyway so well, we usually got along, as I aforementioned, but today we weren’t vibing. I don’t know how else to put it, except and please accept that this kid put out a real intense vibe – it was palpable, tangible, thick like sweat and smelly. It permeated. And so he would have none of my strategy today, he wouldn’t look at the pictures I’d brought, he wouldn’t draw the object or the animal, he wouldn’t engage, he would just scribble in a minor fury. So and there was frustration between us, it seemed, and we couldn’t gel or vibe or get in sync, and at that point my feet were just killing me, just fucking so painful, so that I just had to get down there and untie the Wallabees , and then take them off and then even start massaging the instep, and relieve my poor dogs. And as I massaged the brutal crinks out of my pathetic feet maybe it was that my attitude and posture and vibe changed. Maybe I started feeling better. And well so I guess because of this Mr. Downs and I started to sync up more, and at this particular point in my memory he kind of put his head directly on his desk, right in the middle of his scribbled mess of colors, his full fathom five for frustration, and I could feel this weird vibe from out of his eyes and ears &c. And I massaged my awful clump of a foot and just tuned into his head-on-the-desk vibe. It was harmonic. And then well I could clearly recall, like an eidetic Guinness Book freak the whole scene years earlier on that booze cruise ship—there, in Tokyo, I was there, in the Gulf of fucking Mexico, bending down to the sticky dance club floor, being shown how to do something, learning how to do something, with my laces, as it were. So and in the little corral the twain of us shared, I, like I was doing it in my sleep, I re-laced the new brown leather Wallabees making them somehow instantly comfortable and comforting, endearing them to my feet again, snug in the right places, all the pain and crimp gone.

So well at that point the kid took his head up and the whole trance was over between us it seemed, and but it was a warm and calm and generally gently chilled kind of come-down atmosphere between us and the little cubicle. And I admit that I was happy and my soles were healed and I might have learned something. But I can always unlearn it. Please relate a similar experience.

I was running along the Niagara Parkway a few years ago and I noticed another runner who was running in the opposite direction towards me. Without any hesitation or forethought or planning, we instantly knew just through our eye-contact, our body language, just an overall sense of the other person in the few seconds we had just before our passing that we would high-five each other. And we did. It was probably the most amazing high-five I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. We didn’t even look back at each other. We just kept going. We were in that moment. I sometimes think that the shock-waves from that high-five are still reverberating throughout space and time. 

23. You would best describe yourself as

a)      a petulant phony b)      a monomaniacal fraud c)      the son of Zeus d)      a Narcissistic douche bag

b. 

24.. Do you suffer from black (sometimes known as brown) tongue?

I refuse to google these terms. 

25. Do you know all the words to all the old songs?

Dance, dance, dance. 

26. You are in a room. There is a large loom in the center of the room; an unfinished tapestry of a bear hangs on the loom. The bear is completely white. Where are you?

I am seated before the loom. 

27. All you need is love?

And cheese and whiskey and a good book. 

28. John Dewey or aggravated assault (c/o yrstruly)?

Yes. 

29. Have you ever endured a peek at a relative’s elective surgery, remarked on their scars, assured them that they were not now freakishly repulsive to you, an aberration that made it difficult to not throw up a little bit in your mouth, &c (note: not limited to boob jobs)?

No.

30. What gets wetter and wetter the more it dries? Okay, okay, I admit—I didn’t originate that question! Haven’t you ever stolen or borrowed or pilfered, burgled, pinched, filched, embezzled, &c.? Isn’t it sometimes appropriate to appropriate? Isn’t this what this whole thing is about?

Everything is a copy. We are all thieves. I’m growing restless. I’m off to read East of Eden by John Steinbeck. This is the end. Feel free to pay this meme forward. I hope that you’ve been as entertained as I have been.