At http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/04/critical-library.html
The National Book Critics Circle
regularly posts a list of five books a critic believes reviewers should
have in their libraries. We recently heard from writer and critic
Richard B. Woodward. Here is what Rick pointed out as worth keeping in
your library at all times.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on
Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature, edited by
Fredson Bowers (1980)
Nabokov
is a dangerous writer to emulate. In college I revered his books and
sought to imitate his casual majesty until I realized his linguistic or
formal brilliance was beyond my reach. As a result, I abandoned any
hope of trying to be a novelist myself.
His critical standards toward literature can be no less inhibiting.
Periodically I
have to banish him from my mind as an icy, out-of-touch aristocrat in
order to enjoy in good conscience Dostoevsky, Mann, Faulkner, and
others crushed beneath his weighty judgments. Then, someone will quote
him in a review and, remembering the glinting precision of his
intelligence, I am forced to bring him back from exile.
These two volumes collect his college lectures from the 1950s on seven
works of fiction––Mansfield Park,
Bleak House, Madame Bovary, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, The Walk by Swann’s Place, The Metamorphosis, and Ulysses––and on a select group of
Russian writers, not necessarily his favorites. (Dostoevsky and Gorky
are included.)
Nabokov’s
analytic vocabulary can sound musty as he discusses “themes” and
“symbols.” He was unpardonably chauvinistic toward women writers. But
his zeal for literature is contagious. Above all he wanted his students
to appreciate the array of special effects novelists keep in their bag
of tricks.
He was unafraid to throw around the word genius, being one himself.
Those
who regard themselves as attentive readers should take two of his
sample exams. When I totaled my humiliating score, I realized how much
of a novel’s detail I ordinarily miss in my haste to finish and arrive
at an opinion. In an essay here titled “The Art of Literature and
Commonsense,” he attacks mundane realism and argues that “a seemingly
incongruous detail” always trumps “a seemingly dominant
generalization.” Or as he puts it in a more Nabokovian fashion: “I take
my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his
neighbor’s child, but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a
precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its
favorite toy.”