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Re: Updike on Nabokov
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A.Bouazza: Following Mr Aisenberg's posting, I picked up Updike's "More Matters" and found his review of VN's Collected Short Stories more laudatory than implied...
J.Aisenberg: I went and re-read the review myself and darned if my memory hadn't smudged things up just as Bouazza said. I think I have oddly blurred together some different reviews, and exagerated a couple of the critiques in Updike's [...] in the end he makes a curious sort of argument which tries, as Edmund White also did [...], to separate Nabokov's puzzles and puns from his lyrical descriptions of the everyday, which of course can't be done [...] we might have never have gotten a real taste of his sharp satirical insights about human behavior which suffuses his best work.
JM: Return trips to paradise are risky, but still possible? From Bouazza's excerpts I witnessed Updike's actual revisitations (cf. “Sirin,” his Russian pen-name, means “bird of paradise”; it was Nabokov’s preening gift to stir paradisiacal intimations wherever he alighted." More Matter, pp. 287-290 ) and a cunning conflation of birds, like the peacock and "sirin",by admitting to VN's "preening gift".
As VN often let us know: "In Arcadia Ego." ( one cannot isolate paradise and hell).Besides, it seems to me that Updike was complaining about the hefty posthumous edition, not about the short-stories themselves.
J.Aisenberg draws an important point when he stresses that it is impossible to separate Nabokov's puzzles and puns from his lyrical descriptions - as he shows in his well chosen examples of wording and by recognizing VN's ( never moralistic in its compassion, I must add) acute perception of human behavior.
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J.Aisenberg: I went and re-read the review myself and darned if my memory hadn't smudged things up just as Bouazza said. I think I have oddly blurred together some different reviews, and exagerated a couple of the critiques in Updike's [...] in the end he makes a curious sort of argument which tries, as Edmund White also did [...], to separate Nabokov's puzzles and puns from his lyrical descriptions of the everyday, which of course can't be done [...] we might have never have gotten a real taste of his sharp satirical insights about human behavior which suffuses his best work.
JM: Return trips to paradise are risky, but still possible? From Bouazza's excerpts I witnessed Updike's actual revisitations (cf. “Sirin,” his Russian pen-name, means “bird of paradise”; it was Nabokov’s preening gift to stir paradisiacal intimations wherever he alighted." More Matter, pp. 287-290 ) and a cunning conflation of birds, like the peacock and "sirin",by admitting to VN's "preening gift".
As VN often let us know: "In Arcadia Ego." ( one cannot isolate paradise and hell).Besides, it seems to me that Updike was complaining about the hefty posthumous edition, not about the short-stories themselves.
J.Aisenberg draws an important point when he stresses that it is impossible to separate Nabokov's puzzles and puns from his lyrical descriptions - as he shows in his well chosen examples of wording and by recognizing VN's ( never moralistic in its compassion, I must add) acute perception of human behavior.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/