(no subject)
(For some reason, I have decided to post here everyday again, just little things that strike my fancy, as some sort of chronicle.)
This month, my book club is reading Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Most paperback editions of the book (mine from 1981, B's the in-print Vintage one with that sexy grainy cover paper. God I love that paper.) feature this blurb from the New York Times Book Review calling Ada "a necessary book." I ask you, can a book be necessary? To the religious, Bibles or Korans might be necessary, and there are a few nonfiction or reference books many of us would be hard-pressed to live without, but a novel?
I love novels. I would not hesitate to say that many novels have changed my life in that they profoundly altered the way I view the world or myself or the people around me, opened my mind to places and ideas and ways of thinking I'd never have known otherwise, shown me things of breathless beauty and horror and obscenity, but would I call them "necessary"? No. I would not. Plus, even if I did, I'd say they were necessary to me. This blurb implies some general necessity, as if everyone needs Nabokov.
Now, one of the founding tenets of my personal literary and artistic philosophy (yes, I have one of those. You can take the girl out of the ivory tower...) is that everyone can get something out of every work of art (even if, let's be honest, that something is just a vague sense of revulsion or boredom or something). But does everyone need a novel about incestuous, pretentious cousin-siblings in a parallel universe? It's not that I'm not enjoying this book so far, but my expectations are rather high given all this inflated blurbage. Vladimir Vladimirovich, you have 441 pages to change my life.
That ridiculous word, "necessary," just makes me think of that email forward about how Beethoven's mom almost aborted him. Which is shitty, but are you seriously telling me we'd notice? There are infinite works of art that could be produced by anyone at anytime... ohhh, so that's why I feel so sad and unfulfilled so much of the time. I just miss them! They were necessary!
I should mention as an aside that like everyone else, I loved Lolita and would even argue that it changed my worldview, or at least coincided with a shift in my worldview which Nabokov helped me articulate. What that novel is about to me--and here I'm heavily indebted to Prof. Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky's interpretation in his fabulous Hardboiled Crime Fiction & Film Noir class--is how we make other people into characters in our heads, fit them into our own narratives, and in doing so commit unforgivable violence against them. It's not that I'm not sympathetic to Humbert: I am all the moreseo because I know I've done the same thing. It's incredibly hard not to be solipsistic, hard I think for everyone but especially those of us encouraged to see everything in literary terms.
This month, my book club is reading Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Most paperback editions of the book (mine from 1981, B's the in-print Vintage one with that sexy grainy cover paper. God I love that paper.) feature this blurb from the New York Times Book Review calling Ada "a necessary book." I ask you, can a book be necessary? To the religious, Bibles or Korans might be necessary, and there are a few nonfiction or reference books many of us would be hard-pressed to live without, but a novel?
I love novels. I would not hesitate to say that many novels have changed my life in that they profoundly altered the way I view the world or myself or the people around me, opened my mind to places and ideas and ways of thinking I'd never have known otherwise, shown me things of breathless beauty and horror and obscenity, but would I call them "necessary"? No. I would not. Plus, even if I did, I'd say they were necessary to me. This blurb implies some general necessity, as if everyone needs Nabokov.
Now, one of the founding tenets of my personal literary and artistic philosophy (yes, I have one of those. You can take the girl out of the ivory tower...) is that everyone can get something out of every work of art (even if, let's be honest, that something is just a vague sense of revulsion or boredom or something). But does everyone need a novel about incestuous, pretentious cousin-siblings in a parallel universe? It's not that I'm not enjoying this book so far, but my expectations are rather high given all this inflated blurbage. Vladimir Vladimirovich, you have 441 pages to change my life.
That ridiculous word, "necessary," just makes me think of that email forward about how Beethoven's mom almost aborted him. Which is shitty, but are you seriously telling me we'd notice? There are infinite works of art that could be produced by anyone at anytime... ohhh, so that's why I feel so sad and unfulfilled so much of the time. I just miss them! They were necessary!
I should mention as an aside that like everyone else, I loved Lolita and would even argue that it changed my worldview, or at least coincided with a shift in my worldview which Nabokov helped me articulate. What that novel is about to me--and here I'm heavily indebted to Prof. Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky's interpretation in his fabulous Hardboiled Crime Fiction & Film Noir class--is how we make other people into characters in our heads, fit them into our own narratives, and in doing so commit unforgivable violence against them. It's not that I'm not sympathetic to Humbert: I am all the moreseo because I know I've done the same thing. It's incredibly hard not to be solipsistic, hard I think for everyone but especially those of us encouraged to see everything in literary terms.