Subject
Fwd: 'Nabokov's Blues' review ...
From
Date
Body
EDNOTE. This much belated review of Kurt Johnson & Steven Coates excellent book
NABOKOV's BLUES is a particularly good one. I usrge all admirers of VN's novels
to broaden their knowledge of his work with this volume which is available in
Paper and Hardback.
----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 11:22:00 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: 'Nabokov's Blues' review ...
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
------------------
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/12.02.99/nabokov-9948.html[1]
INSECTUOUS: 'Nabokov's Blues' asserts the rigor of the author's
butterfly writings.
Extreme Lepidoptery
Playing catch-up with Vladimir Nabokov
By Sullivan Bianco
Beware! Hard symbol crash ahead:
"If I could persuade her to overcome her old-fashioned squeamishness
and place simultaneously on palm and pulse (the hand alone would not
be roomy enough!) the noble larva of the Cattelya Hawkmoth (mauve
shades of Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch long colossus,
flesh-colored, with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head
in a stiff 'Sphynxian' attitude."
Slurping up this quote from Nabokov's _Ada_, a book wherein one
character anagrammatizes "insect" to "incest," a reader is tempted to
see the author's passion pointed in a certain direction. It's far
easier to read the physical matter of his novels as symbols. Rather
than take them for their unrelenting senses-working-overtime
processing of the entire world, interpreters would have them be pools
of psychological revelation, poetic cloaks over a genius-fevered,
self-denying cloaca of cosmopolitan compulsions. A new book avers
both his seriousness and the contributions of scientific research to
his mind-bending fiction.
Arriving on the heels of succulent Nabokov reissues (_The Stories of
Vladimir Nabokov_, _The Annotated Lolita_ and his awesome, unfilmable
original screenplay of the latter) and remixes (Adrian Lyne's glazed,
relatively humorless _Lolita_), _Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific
Odyssey of a Literary Genius_ is a gripping side trip. It scrapes
away at an area discussed cursorily, if at all, in biographies of
him: his exhaustive, lifelong love of lepidopterology (the study of
butterflies) and his extensive study of a particular breed, the
Blues, many of which now carry his name and the names of some of his
characters.
For obvious reasons, Nabokov's achievements in novels, short
stories, criticism and theory have overshadowed his contributions to
understanding the butterflies and moths he studied, caught, drew,
classified and dissected from boyhood. What emerges from the
composite science-art portrait by co-authors Steve Coates and Kurt
Johnson is an image of Nabokov and his fiction fused with his avid
admiration for and variegated research into this tiny winged kingdom.
_Nabokov's Blues_' cogent mating of science and sinewy
journalism--Coates is a _New York Times_ editor and Johnson is an
expert on Nabokov's breeds--is a terrific adjunct to the existing
biographical material on him. Andrew Field's 1977 biography tends to
skimp on the butterflies, but Brian Boyd's more enormous, more recent
work (the two-part _Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years_ and _The
Russian Years_) processes the lepidopterological work better. Boyd,
Coates and Johnson are all canny enough to include how
butterfly-hunting trips took Nabokov into the territory and
iconographic layouts that would find their way into his novels.
_Lolita_'s unforgettable car-window views of billboards--the
descriptions of travel that may have caused a surge of sympathy in
Jean Baudrillard--were inspired by the days he spent netting
specimens in the western United States, and he continued to give
readers hyper-real snapshots of America in _Pnin_ and _Pale Fire_.
"Nabokov once claimed he disliked travel unless it involved
butterflies," _Blues_ reminds.
Of the 14 chapters, about half (presumably the ones written by
Coates) scrimmage to cover Nabokov's butterfly work historically
alongside his mammoth literary oeuvre and his turbulent life bouncing
from Russia to Germany to France to the U.S. and finally Switzerland.
The other chapters take up the specific mantle of Nabokov's Blues
butterfly study and are no less interesting. Indeed they are
necessary to get a fuller view of Nabokov's rigorous taxonomy.
Specifically, Nabokov's dissections of the clasping genitalia on
Latin American Blues as well as his near-radical readings of breeds
that appear similar have aided Kurt Johnson in reclassifying them.
Johnson, working in cooperation with Hungarian Zsolt Balint and two
Chilean entomologists, now notes a greater diversity in the species
than had previously been acknowledged.
So, while "Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae" and "Sphingids Over
Water"--two of Nabokov's "extreme splitting" scientific
articles--aren't likely to buoy gentle readers on the can or the bus,
_Nabokov's Blues_' summations offer a new, startling facet of a
brilliant writer and his scientific legacy.
Links:
------
[1]
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/12.02.99/nabokov-9948.html
----- End forwarded message -----
NABOKOV's BLUES is a particularly good one. I usrge all admirers of VN's novels
to broaden their knowledge of his work with this volume which is available in
Paper and Hardback.
----- Forwarded message from spklein52@hotmail.com -----
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 11:22:00 -0400
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: SPKlein52@HotMail.com
Subject: 'Nabokov's Blues' review ...
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
------------------
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/12.02.99/nabokov-9948.html[1]
INSECTUOUS: 'Nabokov's Blues' asserts the rigor of the author's
butterfly writings.
Extreme Lepidoptery
Playing catch-up with Vladimir Nabokov
By Sullivan Bianco
Beware! Hard symbol crash ahead:
"If I could persuade her to overcome her old-fashioned squeamishness
and place simultaneously on palm and pulse (the hand alone would not
be roomy enough!) the noble larva of the Cattelya Hawkmoth (mauve
shades of Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch long colossus,
flesh-colored, with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head
in a stiff 'Sphynxian' attitude."
Slurping up this quote from Nabokov's _Ada_, a book wherein one
character anagrammatizes "insect" to "incest," a reader is tempted to
see the author's passion pointed in a certain direction. It's far
easier to read the physical matter of his novels as symbols. Rather
than take them for their unrelenting senses-working-overtime
processing of the entire world, interpreters would have them be pools
of psychological revelation, poetic cloaks over a genius-fevered,
self-denying cloaca of cosmopolitan compulsions. A new book avers
both his seriousness and the contributions of scientific research to
his mind-bending fiction.
Arriving on the heels of succulent Nabokov reissues (_The Stories of
Vladimir Nabokov_, _The Annotated Lolita_ and his awesome, unfilmable
original screenplay of the latter) and remixes (Adrian Lyne's glazed,
relatively humorless _Lolita_), _Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific
Odyssey of a Literary Genius_ is a gripping side trip. It scrapes
away at an area discussed cursorily, if at all, in biographies of
him: his exhaustive, lifelong love of lepidopterology (the study of
butterflies) and his extensive study of a particular breed, the
Blues, many of which now carry his name and the names of some of his
characters.
For obvious reasons, Nabokov's achievements in novels, short
stories, criticism and theory have overshadowed his contributions to
understanding the butterflies and moths he studied, caught, drew,
classified and dissected from boyhood. What emerges from the
composite science-art portrait by co-authors Steve Coates and Kurt
Johnson is an image of Nabokov and his fiction fused with his avid
admiration for and variegated research into this tiny winged kingdom.
_Nabokov's Blues_' cogent mating of science and sinewy
journalism--Coates is a _New York Times_ editor and Johnson is an
expert on Nabokov's breeds--is a terrific adjunct to the existing
biographical material on him. Andrew Field's 1977 biography tends to
skimp on the butterflies, but Brian Boyd's more enormous, more recent
work (the two-part _Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years_ and _The
Russian Years_) processes the lepidopterological work better. Boyd,
Coates and Johnson are all canny enough to include how
butterfly-hunting trips took Nabokov into the territory and
iconographic layouts that would find their way into his novels.
_Lolita_'s unforgettable car-window views of billboards--the
descriptions of travel that may have caused a surge of sympathy in
Jean Baudrillard--were inspired by the days he spent netting
specimens in the western United States, and he continued to give
readers hyper-real snapshots of America in _Pnin_ and _Pale Fire_.
"Nabokov once claimed he disliked travel unless it involved
butterflies," _Blues_ reminds.
Of the 14 chapters, about half (presumably the ones written by
Coates) scrimmage to cover Nabokov's butterfly work historically
alongside his mammoth literary oeuvre and his turbulent life bouncing
from Russia to Germany to France to the U.S. and finally Switzerland.
The other chapters take up the specific mantle of Nabokov's Blues
butterfly study and are no less interesting. Indeed they are
necessary to get a fuller view of Nabokov's rigorous taxonomy.
Specifically, Nabokov's dissections of the clasping genitalia on
Latin American Blues as well as his near-radical readings of breeds
that appear similar have aided Kurt Johnson in reclassifying them.
Johnson, working in cooperation with Hungarian Zsolt Balint and two
Chilean entomologists, now notes a greater diversity in the species
than had previously been acknowledged.
So, while "Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae" and "Sphingids Over
Water"--two of Nabokov's "extreme splitting" scientific
articles--aren't likely to buoy gentle readers on the can or the bus,
_Nabokov's Blues_' summations offer a new, startling facet of a
brilliant writer and his scientific legacy.
Links:
------
[1]
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/12.02.99/nabokov-9948.html
----- End forwarded message -----