Dear List,

Julian Barnes appears in the Acknowledgments because he answered by mail questions I’d put to him about the influence of Nabokov on his work. At that stage at least (in the late 1980s) he seemed to have read less Nabokov than I had expected, given the repeated squawk of Nabokov in Flaubert’s Parrot. Barnes had not, for instance, read Pale Fire, which one might have thought closest to a novel that uses literary criticism as a way of telling a story of sorts. Since the results were negative, there was no point in mentioning Barnes (and I came to feel anyway that there was no point, in a book already quite fat enough, in discussing the influence of Nabokov on other writers he was never aware of), but I still had to acknowledge him for taking the trouble to provide a thoughtful and exact answer.

Brian Boyd