People sometimes tell me to read Nabokov but I've never been much of a fan. I did once pick up, on the cheap, an annotated version of Lolita which, as well as being quite interesting, perhaps made it appear more legitimate to read than it might otherwise, on the Tube.
Nabokov reads to me like one who has fallen fatally in love with the sound of their own voice. Take this sentence about having all your teeth taken out, from 'Pnin', written at the same time as 'Lolita' :
His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound.
Clearly Nabokov has no idea about what it's like, or what it means, to have all your teeth taken out — not that in 2020 there are many people who do because each human mouth represents a potential cash cow for entrepreneurial dentists. Don't get me started.
Martin Amis has apparently said that this sentence from Pnin is one of the most tragic ever written:
Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin ... One had to forget because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past.
Perhaps Amis is right but white men of a certain age writing tragedy, especially when that involves young women, is dangerous territory — and they would do well to examine their motives, as would admirers of their sentences.
In any case, I can think of several edits that would make it a much better sentence.
#writers #tragedy
