Discovering Nabokov.

I’ve spent the evenings over the last few winters catching up on some of the modern and not-so-modern literary classics that I missed while I was still dreaming about Rupert Bear and Tiger Lily. (What a splendid couple they made – no agendas, you see. No tensions. I was always suspicious of relationships with agendas, and it seemed to me that life carried enough tensions in the here and now without adding to its often ponderous weight by reading about somebody else’s fictional ones.)

But then I spent nine years writing my own fiction, and over those nine years I developed my own style and learned a lot about how to put words together in a way that makes them worth reading. It didn’t make me a good writer, but it gave me a much better understanding of those who were. It’s what makes me feel modestly qualified to be critical – both positively and negatively – of other people’s efforts, and to feel reasonably free to differentiate between the good, the populist but passable, and the never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width stuff like The Duh Vinci Code.

This evening I started reading Nabokov’s Lolita. So far I’ve only read about Lolita’s predecessor-by-twenty-four-years, Annabelle, but it has me well engaged. The narrative is complex yet direct, the observations keen yet perfunctory in expression, the style lyrical yet terse. The words are simple, but the meanings have to be thought about. (And that ultimate preposition was deliberate.) It reminds me a little of somebody idly throwing best caviar to feral pigeons while musing on the odd sight of a smooth column topped by a Corinthian capital. Alternatively, imagine a basketball player sitting on the edge of the court eating a sandwich and reading a newspaper. He lobs the ball casually over his shoulder and it lands dead centre in the basket.

I’ll bet you couldn’t do that again. I’ll bet he could.

I think of literature as having three characteristics – form, style and content. Form is of no concern to me, being mostly the plaything of the academic. Style and content matter to me, and in this case they’re not only both superb, they also match one another perfectly. I’ll let you know if I change my mind.