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Speaking of bringing my own historical position to a reading I also just finished listening to the audiobook of laughter in the dark as well and I'm starting to think that this Nabokov guy might be the perfect embodiment of the petty cruelty and ironic self aggrandizement at the heart of the liberal bourgeois mindset. Fun little story about the shittiest little dude you ever saw (if you never read Lolita). I really liked Lolita and Pnin as well and I think he's extremely talented and funny but also there's something so wrong about his fundamental world view that I feel is so ingrained in the world I already live in that it's hard to put a finger on it. I'd almost think he was parodying the whole thing of it if I didn't already know his political stance and family origin. From what I've heard about Pale Fire it seems like it might not lend well to audio format on account of it being made of hypertext and intra-referencial stuff so I'll have to keep an eye on the used book stores around here until I get a paper copy. Flournival Dixon fucked around with this message at 22:46 on May 3, 2024 |
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May 3, 2024 22:33
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Nabokov was absolutely parodying the real world. I think you're letting your assumptions about his character override the actual work you're reading. Even in his earlier works he had an eye for the absurdity of society, the beauty of the mundane, and the total hypocrisy from anyone who drew breath.
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May 3, 2024 23:33
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That's probably true, I definitely understand that he's making fun of the people in his class pretty sincerely. It might be a little hypocritical of me to make excuses for Umberto Eco and then immediately talk poo poo about Nabokov just because his claimed ideology is bad and Eco is at least ostensibly on my side lol Maybe sometime when I have the stomache for it I'll reread Lolita with an eye to how he treats lower class people, i feel like he was always pretty kind (but also a little patronizing?) in that regard but it's been a little while. Flournival Dixon fucked around with this message at 00:41 on May 4, 2024 |
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May 4, 2024 00:31
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re eco's depth for conspiracy and nabokov's wholly unlikable narrator, check out the former's Prague Cemetery. i didnt know anything about it (aside from its by Eco so hell yeah) when i started reading and it was a real joy to experience how terrible and small the world is, so to speak
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May 4, 2024 00:45
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Lolita is probably not the novel I would use to gain insight into Nabokov’s personal views
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May 5, 2024 02:53
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Depends. If you want to know what he thinks of Freud, there's a whole lot of that there.
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May 5, 2024 03:06
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That's all of his books though
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May 5, 2024 03:08
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any 21st century lit heads gonna read botm? finished franzen so im wide open
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May 5, 2024 20:09
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ok botm is really bad so i dont recommend it. anyway while at the library printing off proof im crazy i came home with two Borges. i intended on just Ficciones but didn't realize how thin it was so swiped The Aleph and Other Stories as well 
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May 8, 2024 23:56
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Borges is short but to give the stories their due they need some long digestion. At least the bigger ones like Babel, Funes, and Circular Ruins.
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May 9, 2024 00:03
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I usually read a Borges story twice in a row
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May 9, 2024 12:00
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I like the one where Judas is the actual hero of the Bible and Jesus had it easy because all he had to do was get betrayed while Judas had to get damned for eternity just so Jesus could become the Savior.
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May 10, 2024 14:14
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Finally recovered from literary doldrums reading the collected works of Lu Xun (1881-1936), including The Real Story of Ah-Q. Lu was one of the first Chinese writers to break with classical style and published dozens of short stories about life in China which he saw as combatting the stultified hierarchies. Common targets are imperial exams, poverty, traditional Chinese medicine, and over-revolutionary fervor. There's some lovely nuance and humour, especially in the title novella which sees a hapless layabout caught up in the political intrigues of early 20th century China. Though Lu was championed by Mao and was the head of the League of Left-Wing Writers, his writing is ambiguous and cynical of political promises, ribbing simple people and expressing sympathy for the struggles of everyday life. The last quarter of the collection is also some lovely updating of classical myths, showing a great bridging between age. I think my favourite story was A Public Example, about onlookers and spectacle, but Lu really holds up well with other short story masters and I encourage people to read him. Wonderful stories that sit with you.
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May 10, 2024 16:40
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https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1789010532709617971
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May 11, 2024 14:47
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I like the idea Grendel as just an unusually strong hermit, the last of an uncivilized line.
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May 11, 2024 15:11
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What a picture of Bautista to pick lol
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May 11, 2024 16:43
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Finally managed to get a copy of Solenoid. I swear this book is not in print in the UK. Found a copy in a bookshop in Pasadena tho 
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May 11, 2024 21:02
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can you smell what the spear-dane is cookin?
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May 11, 2024 21:31
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i think i'm going to give the autobiography of alice b toklas a read, and after that Trakl's poetry
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May 12, 2024 12:19
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Finished Lolita last week after chipping away at it for months, then I took the momentum from that to burn through Disgrace by Coetzee over the last few days. Both are excellent (Lolita stunningly so; I wish the subject matter was Literally Anything Else so that I could talk about it with people), but they also made for an unexpectedly appropriate duology. I had no idea what Disgrace was about before picking it up on a recommendation from Mina Kimes. fake edit: also finished Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt for a book club, which is very breezy beach reading. Can't really recommend it, but at least it was a bit of a relieving counterpoint to these other two works.
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May 12, 2024 15:17
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You can talk about Lolita here. We cleared out the riff-raff a while ago on this topic.
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May 12, 2024 15:23
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It's so hard to talk about Lolita because people who know (or think they know) what it's about but haven't read it just immediately assume you're, at best, deeply weird or at worst a literal pedophile. It is my favorite book, and I have an Annotated copy that is heavily marked with my own annotations and every so often I pick it up and read passages at random and every single time I find new allusions and new little games Nabokov plays. I never pick it up without a pencil and a ton of sticky notes
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May 12, 2024 15:28
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Heath posted:It's so hard to talk about Lolita because people who know (or think they know) what it's about but haven't read it just immediately assume you're, at best, deeply weird or at worst a literal pedophile. It is my favorite book, and I have an Annotated copy that is heavily marked with my own annotations and every so often I pick it up and read passages at random and every single time I find new allusions and new little games Nabokov plays. I never pick it up without a pencil and a ton of sticky notes I read the 1991 edition annotated by Appel, and I slightly regret reading it with annotations first because I'm curious what the experience would've been like otherwise, but I also think the annotations multiplied my appreciation for the work. That book is an absolute feast; it's ridiculous. surf rock fucked around with this message at 15:40 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 15:36
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Yeah, absolutely don't read it with annotations on your first read. The second read, definitely, because you'll see just how intricate it is.
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May 12, 2024 15:52
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I read it on a kindle, which made it really easy to click on a word and take a dive (admittedly shallow) into the etymology, and it amazed me how often that deep cut knowledge of a word added to the story. Like if the older definition of a word disagreed with the current definition, the older definition would represent the characters inner thoughts. Unfortunately since I was on a kindle it was hard to take notes on those little things. But man that was a good book.
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May 12, 2024 17:21
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Segue posted:Finally recovered from literary doldrums reading the collected works of Lu Xun (1881-1936), including The Real Story of Ah-Q. Lu Xun's really good, and I don't think "Ah Q" is his best when there's "An Incident", or the madman looking for treasure, or all the village stories. Which translation did you read? Mine didn't have the "old tales retold".
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May 13, 2024 04:54
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Madman was very good. The Loner too, honestly it all stands out. Dude was really frustrated at his society. I read the Penguin Classics which bills itself as his complete fiction. More modern romanization and notes on pronunciation, pretty solid. 
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May 13, 2024 16:36
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ulvir posted:i think i'm going to give the autobiography of alice b toklas a read, and after that Trakl's poetry Autobiography of alice b toklas is good as an intro to gertrude stein imo.
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May 13, 2024 18:25
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Currently reading henry green's 'caught', and it's slightly washing over me, but the dialogue in it is really good, well worth getting just to see how badly people usually represent ordinary speech
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May 13, 2024 18:26
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speaking of nabokov i now understand why he couldnt bring himself to talk poo poo about borges. thats cause borges is a motherfucking master. even when rereading and discovering or making new connections do i realize the depths go so much deeper in his short fiction. Ficciones is so good. ive read up to Garden of Forking Paths and i'm blown away by not just each story's quality but the little connections they share, pyramids and mirrors and this idea of duplicity played out in different ways like The Circular Ruins guy not just creating but being created (and i liked him crawling and bleeding to his cozy stone womb too) or, my favorite one so far, Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, tackling the idea in literature and lifestyle. this one in particular is so drat fascinating, i feel like i could walk around as long as i'd like thinking about it and still not run out of threads. it's interesting how duplicity is sort of described in dark light in the other stories but this one in particular reveres menard, makes him such an admirable and interesting author. but i suppose he too is a reflection gonna return Aleph without reading for now cuz yea you guys weren't kidding, these books widths are deceiving. and i want to save Aleph for another time knowing i'll be set...
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May 14, 2024 01:26
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Borges doesn't always hit but some of his ideas are strong enough that they'll stick around in your head for longer than you'd ever think possible. Just finished Nabokov's Bend Sinister, funny to think about how different it might have been written a couple years later after 1984 came out. The disastrous failure of not only the dystopian state but also the entire concept of heroic individualism leading to such a nihilistic end that the author, himself a dedicated individualist, just pulls the ripcord on the whole thing to remind everyone that this guy never existed and the story is a work of fiction is pretty funny. Nabokov's disdain for his protagonists is always somehow right on the line between me getting tired of it and enjoying it immensely.
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May 15, 2024 20:50
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lol autobiography of alice b toklas is good because stein suddenly drops the act out of the blue and is all “ok so enough about her, here’s how my formative years as a medical student in baltimore transpired”
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May 15, 2024 21:06
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Been thinking about Banville again, since last night, when I went back to the interviews I read with him before, as well as ideas of writing, along with poetry and other "artforms" unrelated to literature. There's a definite tendency to, to put it in my own bollocks, "explore the boundaries of language itself" and "the musicality, etc. and such vomit of language." I understand the desire to reach for an an understanding of a word as a thing, in itself. It is a combination of creativity and technique. But words have meanings. They're not always strict, or even widely agreed on (which is where fun comes into things) but in essence they do have a meaning. It is "literary." And for communicative purposes. With the idea that both form and function are in co-operation. Go the opposite direction and you have stories written to purely communicate something. I might as well read a technical manual, or an "Intro to..." university book. I've been struggling, quite hard, recently, to find something that has the correct balance of both, for me. You'd often see people say, "I didn't relate to any of the characters in the book," as an issue. Recently, I've found I don't relate to the writing. Not in an aesthetic sense, or a communicative sense — to single out one over the other would be reductive —but in the entirety of what writing means.
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May 17, 2024 12:32
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Finished book 1 of Knausgaard's My Struggle. Ngl kinda mesmerised how he can write so plainly about the mundane but also write so eloquently about it at the same time. The way he can add significance and weight to even the simplest of things like getting dressed or making coffee is 
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May 17, 2024 17:03
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I struggle to start Knausgard because I just don't find autofiction particularly compelling, but I may pick up his more recent actual fiction novel to get a sense of his prose, I've heard some passages are breathtaking. Finishing up Achebe's trilogy which isn't as good as Things Fall apart but still good, and stumbling through Akbeh's Martyr! which is doing absolutely nothing for me with yet another adrift protagonist having existential conversations. But a few people told me it had them at the end so there's hope!
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May 17, 2024 21:08
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Mrenda posted:You'd often see people say, "I didn't relate to any of the characters in the book," as an issue.
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May 17, 2024 21:12
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I just blew through Ulysses for the first time a couple of days ago at the recommendation of a friend. What a book! I don’t have much to say I suppose but I’ve been thinking about bloom and his flaws and his strengths for days and the meanings of his different relationships and interactions. The moments of parallax, while probably not as mind blowing for someone reading it in 2024, must have been mind blowing for the time. The fact that the book was written over a hundred years ago kept blowing my mind at different points throughout the book. Also, cliche I know, but mollys final chapter at the end left me stunned for a few hours. I haven’t read a lot of the things that the story alludes to, like hamlet or the odyssey, but they’re definitely on my to do list now. I definitely want to read it again but I think I might wait a few years on this one, just for how difficult the text can be in places. Plus I might get more out of it when I’m closer to blooms age. I guess the last thing I want to say is that I was surprised at how life affirming the book is, considering the plot is basically molly’s affair weighing on bloom’s mind all day. It’s one of those books that almost makes me feel like I can see the world in a better way than before I read it. I’d love to know what you guys think of the book, since I can’t really talk to anyone about the book in real life and I won’t see the friend who recommended it to me for at least a week. Cheers!
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May 17, 2024 21:41
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Segue posted:I struggle to start Knausgard because I just don't find autofiction particularly compelling, but I may pick up his more recent actual fiction novel to get a sense of his prose, I've heard some passages are breathtaking. Don't do this. Read Vol. 1 instead. If you don't like it you can drop the entire project. I really do hate how talented he is. It's not fair at all. Edit: it doesn't feel like autofiction in the slightest. He'll go off on a beautiful and moving digression and you never even realize it until he brings it back and sticks the landing. Over and over again.
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May 17, 2024 21:46
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Wait Morningstar is connected to My Struggle, not standalone?
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May 17, 2024 22:27
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I find it hard to get stuck on the distinction of autofiction cuz to be perfectly honest I have never heard of Karl ove knausgaard or any of the ppl he's talking about before so how closely the events he's writing about are to reality is kinda inconsequential
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May 17, 2024 22:33
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