Pale Fire

Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
read: 2015
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #53, Guardian 1000 Novels

Pale Fire has a unique structure, with the novel told in footnotes to the titular poem. The commentator, Charles Kinbote, serves as an unreliable narrator, believing that the poem is a tribute to his homeland of Zembla and the tales he told poet John Shade about his native land. We're meant to laugh at Kinbote's naivete, in part, but I think there's a compelling point here about the baggage that readers bring when interpreting works. The author's intention matters, certainly, but the audience for art is always bringing its own perspective and experience.

I don't find the story of Kinbote, Shade, and John Gradus really compelling in and of itself apart from the metafictional gimmick. There's some interesting guesswork as to whether Zembla is real, whether Gradus planned to kill Kinbote or Shade, whether Shade and Kinbote were really friends, etc., but it's an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional one: I don't really care what the answers are.

Lolita

Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
read: circa 2007
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #4, Guardian 1000 Novels

I might not give Lolita a perfect 10, but it gets the highest possible score for degree-of-difficulty.  How many authors try telling a love story about a pedophile?  Still, while I love moral ambiguity in my novels, Lolita might be a bridge too far.  It is one thing to tell the story of a pedophile, it is another to tell it from a first-person perspective in a manic style, comic and even gleeful at times.  Part of this is my limited perspective; this is the only novel of Nabokov's I've read, and I think this limits my ability to distinguish between Vladimir Nabokov the author and Humbert Humbert the narrator.

The other element of Lolita that doesn't quite resonate with me is its relationship with the written word.  This is a stupid and ignorant criticism of a novel, I know.  In 2012 (or even 1955 when Lolita was written), the novel has been surpassed in immediacy by other forms, especially television and film.  All art involving the written word is on some level a statement about the written word.  Authors almost have an obligation to answer the question, "why write this as a book?"  Professor Amy Hungerford of Yale (this is the third book for her class The American Novel Since 1945) notes how the prose is steeped in literary references to romantic stories (such as Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabelle Lee") and likens Lolita to the chess problems Nabokov was so fond of.  But the art I love best is not just clever; it carries a meaning beyond itself, striking universal chords in the human experience.  At its best (such as when Humbert realizes to his own surprise that he really does love Dolores), Lolita does this, but often it feels clever for its own sake.  Professor Hungerford references Martin Amis describing Nabokov's prose as akin to "a muscle-bound man, a man whose body is bulked up purely for aesthetic reasons, for only the purpose of looking a certain way, that the bodybuilder is not that person who's going to go out and use their muscles to do some job."  It's hard to imagine anyone doing a better job of that than Nabokov did here, but for me personally, that ain't what I'm looking for in a novel.