1. Tough call for me. The stifling atmosphere and frozen setting of this one, a kind of Soviet criticism novel, left a chill. So it gets the choice today.
2. Personal - read Decameron. 🙂
3. Lazy mornings.
#wondrouswednesday
Thanks @Eggs for the tag.
pickLove this photo of VN holding a butterfly in 1947, the year this was published.
Nabokov‘s first American novel pokes tragic fun at the Soviet Union and the surreal effect of arbitrary terror and constant warping of reality. It‘s, well, a bit difficult, as he plays games with different languages, obscure English words and syntaxes. It can be confusing. But mainly he works the tension of situations, mixing irreverent humor and dreadful happenings.
I‘ve been hacking through this almost a week so far, trying to find some sense of direction. It feels like an all out attack on the English language. (It might be).
In his intro, VN says, “automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations or Orwell's clichés would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one.” (It‘s safe to say VN read both.)
“Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. “ This has long been one of my favorite lines about fiction. LitHub posted an article today containing this Nabokov quote & other memorable ones: https://lithub.com/every-great-writer-is-a-great-deceiver-vladimir-nabokovs-best...
pickWow, the first Nabokov I've read. It's very carefully crafted and arranged, and so dense with the imageries and metaphors that I read it twice, because the text is so rich.
Bend Sinister | 
