Subject
Pniniad (fwd)
Date
Body
From Seattle's THE STRANGER, Jan 1, 1998/The List of best and worst of
1997:
Non-Fiction: The Real World
By Charles Mudede
THE BEST NON-FICTION BOOK: The Russian American novelist Nabokov said that
the appreciation most serious readers had of modernists such as Thomas
Mann and William Faulkner was delusional, "like a hypnotized man making
love to a chair." Now, one would think that a man who could say such an
amazing thing would be the topic of many interesting books, but this is
not the case. Much of what has been written about Nabokov is dry, often
concerned with the wrong things and missing "the great joke" altogether.
Only Alfred Appel's NABOKOV'S DARK CINEMA and Michael Wood's 1995 THE
MAGICIAN'S DOUBTS, and now Galya Diment's 1997 PNINIAD, have been able to
produce the delicate mix of sensitivity, sadness, and laughter required of
any appraisal of this bizarre writer's life. Diment, a UW Professor,
produced not only a great study of the writer, but the best read this
year.
1997:
Non-Fiction: The Real World
By Charles Mudede
THE BEST NON-FICTION BOOK: The Russian American novelist Nabokov said that
the appreciation most serious readers had of modernists such as Thomas
Mann and William Faulkner was delusional, "like a hypnotized man making
love to a chair." Now, one would think that a man who could say such an
amazing thing would be the topic of many interesting books, but this is
not the case. Much of what has been written about Nabokov is dry, often
concerned with the wrong things and missing "the great joke" altogether.
Only Alfred Appel's NABOKOV'S DARK CINEMA and Michael Wood's 1995 THE
MAGICIAN'S DOUBTS, and now Galya Diment's 1997 PNINIAD, have been able to
produce the delicate mix of sensitivity, sadness, and laughter required of
any appraisal of this bizarre writer's life. Diment, a UW Professor,
produced not only a great study of the writer, but the best read this
year.