Sign-In
Cart
The Bliss of Precision: Nabokov and the Cost of Unseeing
Paperback
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN13: 9798185798416
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 6 2026
Pages: 344
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.72 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 6 2026
Pages: 344
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.72 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
We praise Vladimir Nabokov for seeing the world more sharply than anyone alive. This book asks what that sharpness cost - and whether such seeing is a form of love or a form of refusal.
Nabokov held the world at the length of an entomologist's arm: the butterfly caught, stilled, spread, and pinned. He turned the same lens on his governesses, his lovers, his lost Russia, and himself, and left behind prose of almost unbearable precision - brilliant, exact, and cold to the touch. Was the coldness a defect, or the very engine of the vision? Can anyone look that closely and stay warm, or is the closeness itself a way of holding the world at arm's length?
Nabokov held the world at the length of an entomologist's arm: the butterfly caught, stilled, spread, and pinned. He turned the same lens on his governesses, his lovers, his lost Russia, and himself, and left behind prose of almost unbearable precision - brilliant, exact, and cold to the touch. Was the coldness a defect, or the very engine of the vision? Can anyone look that closely and stay warm, or is the closeness itself a way of holding the world at arm's length?
At the center of the book stands Lolita, the one novel by the century's most controlled writer that burns rather than gleams. Here the paradox turns lethal. Humbert Humbert wields the whole apparatus of Nabokovian attention - the sensuous exactness, the cataloguing of every detail - yet aims it entirely at his own mirror. He never sees the child. He dissolves a living girl into an idea, while the real Dolores weeps at the margins of his gorgeous sentences, and the reader is made to perform the seeing the narrator refused.
From that node the book turns its most dangerous question backward, upon the memoirist himself. Did Nabokov escape Humbert, or only name him? Prosecuting the chill and defending the doctrine that attention is the highest form of love, this study lets neither side win - and leaves the nerve exposed.
A meditation on genius, cruelty, memory, and the thin, trembling line between the saint of attention and its monster. KEYWORDS
Vladimir Nabokov, literary criticism, perception, attention, Lolita, memory, consciousness
From that node the book turns its most dangerous question backward, upon the memoirist himself. Did Nabokov escape Humbert, or only name him? Prosecuting the chill and defending the doctrine that attention is the highest form of love, this study lets neither side win - and leaves the nerve exposed.
A meditation on genius, cruelty, memory, and the thin, trembling line between the saint of attention and its monster. KEYWORDS
Vladimir Nabokov, literary criticism, perception, attention, Lolita, memory, consciousness
Also from
Kriger, Boris
Why We Don't Fly Like Birds: Gravity, Anatomy, and the Metaphysics of Freedom
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
The Evil of Banality: Hannah Arendt, Frames, Awareness, and the Refusal to Look Away
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$24.00
Freedom from Taxes: Introduction of Automated Payment Transaction Tax and Universal Basic Income
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$9.60
Why the Universe Is Not a Lottery: Attractors and the End of Cosmic Coincidence
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$30.00
The Arithmetic of Happiness: How Jeremy Bentham Tried to Count the Human Soul
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
Cutting the Continuum: Zeno's Paradoxes from the Bounded Observer to the Edge of the Cosmos
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
A Theory of the Cinematic Masterpiece in the Generative Era: Temporal Sovereignty, the Carriers of Density, and Why Technical Progress Makes Art Deare
Halushko, Denys
Kriger, Boris
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$13.20
Absurd Faith for an Absurd World: The Tertullian Paradox in the Age of Unreason
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$17.20
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: How Accusation Became the World's Favorite Pastime
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
The Bluff of Decolonization in Controlled Chaos: Frantz Fanon and the Invisible Chains
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
The Morality Trap: How Humanity's Noblest Idea Became Its Most Dangerous Weapon
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
The Last Absolutism: Why Companies Are the Final Refuge of Autocracy
Kaminski, Jaroslaw F.
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
Theories That Outlive Their Reasons: Maxwell, and What Unification Actually Means
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$32.40
Homo Symbolicus: Ernst Cassirer, the Philosopher Who Won the Argument and Lost the Century
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$30.00
How Knowledge Breaks and Remakes Itself: Thomas Kuhn and the Secret Life of Scientific Change
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
$38.00
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
From $17.99
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
$42.75
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback
From $9.99