Nabokov in Switzerland
Martin A m is Tnansparent Things Vladimir Nabokov.(Weiclenfeld and Nicolson £1.75) The qualities for which Nabokov is most often praised seem to me to be among the least interesting in his work. His verbal goonery ("the rose sore of Eros" and "the sunlasses of the sung lasses" are examples 'rnm Ada) ought clearly to be the preserve of such artists as Mr Stanley Unwin. His connoisseurship of the intellectual life is indisputable but the rarefied swank of his standard creations distances it unprofitably. And his ironic quasi-scholarship, though often diverting, bespeaks little more than a lumber of erudition which the author couldn't be bothered to keep in check; at his worst, one feels that Nabolov is stuffing his books with symbols and allusions merely so that he can prise them out again to amaze his undergraduates. °nIY at his worst, however; these self-indulgences are indulgences, but there would be, nothing much left' of his real strengths Without them.
Let us, as Nabokov would say, illustrate our. difficulties. This new novella contains a tYpical portrait of an obese, decadent, aristo
cratic, incest-prone, nymphet-fancying, overtly ' stylish ' Central-European novelist, °ne Mr R. From what we see of his work, R. aPPears to be an impressionable minor talent Who has just finished Lolita; but the two characteristics put forward as peculiar to his Writing are very much peculiar to Nabokov aviso. Firstly, the "streak of _nasty in „entiveness"—the wounding parenthetical ufe-histories, reports of grotesque failures, aberrations, deaths (her father ” got killed. While supervising the demolition of a famous note' in a defunct spa," "the same sleuth,
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