It
seems Robbe-Grillet is rarely discussed on this forum, despite VN's obvious
enjoyment of his novels. Given that THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA is supposed to
be a radical departure from Nabokov's work, and given VN's interest in R-G's
boundary-expanding/breaking writing, especially late in his career, I was
curious if TOOL follows somewhat in this high-modernist path.
I
could be completely out of bounds on this one, but I have always detected a R-G
strain when re-reading a book like TRANSPARENT THINGS and I was wondering if
TOOL is perhaps a story more in this interesting line of narrative.
Of
course, VN was never a mere imitator, but it seems to me that Nabokov was as
rebellious as he ever was towards the end, and would hardly resort to putting
together a traditional novel, or even a "post-modernist" traditional
novel, TOOL sounds to me more like something that exists in a
Robbe-Grillet abstraction (at least from the bits of details that have
emerged.)
I was
also wondering if Dmitri Nabokov could shed some light on his
father's opinions of R-G's latter, less well-known but I think even more baroque
and interesting novels (thinking here particularly of the hugely underrated
PROJECT FOR A REVOLUTION IN NEW YORK, from 1970,
also LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS from
66)?