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The Bliss of Precision: Nabokov and the Cost of Unseeing
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ISBN13: 9798185798416
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 344
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.72 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
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
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