A.Bouazza: Following Mr
Aisenberg's posting, I picked up Updike's "More Matters" and found his review of
VN's Collected Short Stories more laudatory than implied...
J.Aisenberg: I went and re-read the
review myself and darned if my memory hadn't smudged things up just as Bouazza
said. I think I have oddly blurred together some different reviews, and
exagerated a couple of the critiques in Updike's [...] in the end he makes
a curious sort of argument which tries, as Edmund White also did [...], to
separate Nabokov's puzzles and puns from his lyrical descriptions of the
everyday, which of course can't be done [...] we might have never have
gotten a real taste of his sharp satirical insights about human behavior which
suffuses his best work.
JM: Return trips to paradise are
risky, but still possible? From Bouazza's excerpts I witnessed Updike's
actual revisitations (cf. “Sirin,”
his Russian pen-name, means “bird of paradise”; it was Nabokov’s preening gift
to stir paradisiacal intimations wherever he alighted."
More Matter, pp. 287-290 )
and a cunning conflation of birds, like
the peacock and "sirin",by admitting to VN's "preening
gift".
As VN often let us know: "In Arcadia Ego." ( one cannot
isolate paradise and hell).Besides, it seems to me
that Updike
was complaining about the hefty posthumous edition, not
about the short-stories themselves.
J.Aisenberg draws an important point when he stresses
that it is impossible to separate Nabokov's puzzles and puns from his
lyrical descriptions - as he shows in his well chosen examples of wording and by
recognizing VN's ( never moralistic in its compassion, I must
add) acute perception of human behavior.