Vladimir Nabokov

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

May 29, 2018 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

It’s hard to properly write the title for this memoir in the boxes on this site because it has a comma in the title and that gums up the works a little. The title is an apostrophe, telling Memory to Speak. I don’t mean to explain that to you, but for all the years I knew of this title and thought about reading it, I couldn’t ever make sense of it. I read Harry Potter in high school and didn’t the joke of Diagon Alley until I was 30, so… This is ostensibly an autobiography of Nabokov’s first 30 years […]

5/29/2018 vel veeter's CBR10 Review No:173 |

Triptych of no real consequence

The Eye; The Shawl; The Breast by Vladimir Nabokov; Cynthia Ozick; Philip Roth

February 10, 2018 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Philip Roth – The Breast 2/5 Cynthia Ozick – The Shawl 4/5 Vladimir Nabokov – The Eye 3/5 So these three short novels or novellas don’t really have much to do with one another ostensibly, but I read them one after the other on a Friday sick day and thought a little about their connections or rather what connections I might draw on them. To start, I will tell you what each one of them is about. The Shawl starts off in the middle of WWII somewhere in Poland with a mother and two young women of various […]

2/10/2018 vel veeter's CBR10 Review No:32 |

It’s gross you guys.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

January 20, 2018 by tillie 12 Comments

Lolita is a narrative that permeates pop culture, in advertisements, references and romanticizing of things that are not okay. This narrative probably originates from the 1997 film adaptation starring Jeremy Irons: When I was a teenager this novel was a way to live out my own sexuality and confused feelings about adults around me. These adults were mostly male teachers making Humbert Humbert the perfect stand-in. However engaging with this story as an adult is a bit different. It’s gross you guys. Lolita is the story of a man who abducts a child and then repeatedly rapes her while […]

1/20/2018 tillie's CBR10 Review No:3 |

A fantastic farrago of evil

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

August 10, 2017 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This book has some serious payoff at the end, and of course a wonderful fake index that clarifies and makes everything right. If you don’t know this one, this is a novel in the form of an academic annotation of a long poem. The poem itself is a 1000 (technically 999) line poem about a pastoral and academic life, love and marriage, childhood, parenting, death. Like what most poems are about, with a kind of erudition and educated set of allusions. The notes on this poem are written by the poet’s friend, an emigre scholar from a war-torn fictional country […]

8/10/2017 vel veeter's CBR9 Review No:328 |

Tomorrow all his youth, his Russia, was coming back to him again.

Mary by Vladimir Nabokov

May 18, 2017 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Something has been lost in the inter-connectivity of the modern world. The distances that used to separate us physically, created emotional gulfs that also separated us. One of the strongest themes in Lonesome Dove is how the actual physical size and landscape of the American West created this kind of emotional distance. Even yesterday as my girlfriend and I were having an unofficial anniversary dinner, we got on the topic of the weeks and months leading up to our meeting three years ago. This isn’t an artificial anniversary for us, merely that we don’t have a specific date. And because it’s […]

5/18/2017 vel veeter's CBR9 Review No:205 |

My first recollection of Timofey Pnin is connected with a speck of coal dust that entered my left eye

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

May 16, 2017 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Here’s an older Nabokov talking about the best American novels: I show you this to get a sense of his voice and his mannerisms. In this short novel, we are introduced to a Russian professor named Timofey Pnin, who immigrated to the US to teach at a small liberal arts college in New England in the 1940s. The novel starts off with Pnin getting a train to report to a conference where he has been enlisted to give a talk. In a way not unlike To the Lighthouse it’s unclear if we’ll ever see him get there, not because of a […]

5/16/2017 vel veeter's CBR9 Review No:202 |

In a way this novel has the same plot as Secret of My Success

King Queen Knave by Vladimir Nabokov

May 11, 2017 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

So basically this is about a youngish wife of an older and vulgar husband seducing his young nephew and not only cuckolding him, but attempting to dislodge him/murder him. See, basically the same thing. It’s not really, especially since this novel predates the movies about 60 years and also because that’s an absurdly stupid comparison. Sigh, oh well. It’s kind of easy to tell that this is an early novel of his. It’s not that it feel incomplete or undone in any way, but it has a kind of sheen of falsity around it. Not like it doesn’t ring true […]

5/11/2017 vel veeter's CBR9 Review No:196 |

A Baker’s Dozen

Nabokov's Dozen (Spring in Fialta and Other Stories) by Vladimir Nabokov

May 9, 2017 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Nabokov wrote a ton. He lost the Nobel Prize in a weird year where two judges essentially gave it to each other, but he is easily one of if not the most important and impressive writers of the 20th century, if not ever. He’s mostly known for Lolita of course, which you should read immediately, and like a lot of author’s whose most (in)famous book overshadows a lot of his career, his other great books and stories get overlooked. He wrote supremely in two very different language and probably could have written in two more. He translated his own work, his […]

5/9/2017 vel veeter's CBR9 Review No:194 |

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