Anyway, I’ve made the mental decision to quit wallowing in the shitpool that 2020 has become and pretend that September 1st is the start of a new year—one that can���DzԱ�����get better. Sure, I know that with the election coming up—and, more terrifying, the possible aftermath if Trump loses—COVID still raging, cops still killing blacks, a more-than-decimated economy, etc., my little shift of perspective isn’t going to have any�����𲹱���impact, but I need to get some motivation back. The pandemic has railroaded my general vibe and interest in books and ideas, and I feel like I have to do something to at least start recovering. So here we are. Writing as many days of the week as possible, trying to engage with books and ideas, and trying to find a sense of humor again.

Which brings me to the meat of this post.

In preparation for the next season of the Two Month Review, I reread Nabokov’s���ʲԾ���—one of the last title in my multi-year re/read of Nabokov’s books. (I still have Strong Opinions�����Ի����ٳ����Collected Stories to go, after we finish��Ada.)

If you haven’t read��Pnin, it’s kind of the perfect campus novel for our times. The titular figure is a parody of a Russian professor, working at a university where he’s��too fluent��in French to teach any of those classes (“In 1950, when Hash was away, I engaged that Swiss skiing instructor and he smuggled in mimeo copies of some old French anthology. It took us almost a year to bring the class back to its initial level. Now, if what’s-his-name does not read French—” “I’m afraid he does,” said Hagen with a sigh.), and where he barely has any students in the Russian courses he does teach.

I’m a sucker for books like this that poke fun at academia, and this particular passage felt like a great way to bring some fun back to Three Percent and set a new tone (at least for the moment?).

And still the College creaked on. Hard-working graduates, with pregnant wives, still wrote dissertations on Dostoevski and Simone de Beauvoir. Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers. Word plastics like “conflict” and “pattern” were still in vogue. As usual, sterile instructors successfully endeavored to “produce” by reviewing the books of more fertile colleagues, and, as usual, a crop of lucky faculty members were enjoying or about to enjoy various awards received earlier in the year. Thus, an amusing little grant was affording the versatile Starr couple—baby-faced Christopher Starr and his child-wife Louise—of the Fine Arts Department the unique opportunity of recording postwar folk songs in East Germany, into which these amazing young people. had somehow obtained permission to penetrate. Tristram W. Thomas (“Tom” to his friends), Professor of Anthropology, had obtained ten thousand dollars from the Mandoville Foundation for a study of the eating habits of Cuban fishermen and palm climbers. Another charitable institution had come to the assistance of Dr. Bodo von Falternfels, to enable him to complete “a bibliography concerned with such published and manuscript material as has been devoted in recent years to a critical appraisal of the influence of Nietzsche’s disciples on Modern Thought.” And, last but not least, the bestowal of a particularly generous grant was allowing the renowned Waindell psychiatrist, Dr. Rudolph Aura, to apply to ten thousand elementary school pupils the so-called Fingerbowl Test, in which the child is asked to dip his index in cups of colored fluids whereupon the proportion between length of digit and wetted part is measured and plotted in all kinds of fascinating graphs.

*

To make this is a bit more meaty—and to return to a book I wrote about many moons ago and am still reading—here’s a bit from the “Pnin: Cruelty” chapter of Azar Nafisi’s , which is translated from the Farsi by Lotfali Khonji.

In a brilliant chapter of his book on Nabokov,��America’s Russian Novelist, G. M. Hyde, when dealing with Pnin, recalls the tradition of�����첹��.��The word, a cognate of��skazka (which means a popular or vulgar story in Russian), refers to a narrative that the author introduces indirectly, through the intercession of an imagined narrator.��Skaz, having its origins in popular oral storytelling, refers to myriad tricks and methods deployed by the storyteller—diversions, parenthetical points, and habitual or repetitive phrases—in order to stop the narrative and divert the audience’s attention from the story back to the storyteller. In this way, the improbability of the story is concealed and further excitement generated, exactly as we see in Pnin. [. . .]

Nabokov wrote extensively on Gogol, whose work he enjoyed and respected. [. . .]���ʲԾ�����can be considered Nabokov’s best gift to Gogol. According to Hyde, Nabokov succeeds, in��Pnin, in creating his own critical “pattern” following his search for the sources of the methods or devices employed by Gogol. He then incorporates this pattern in the structure of his own novel. Hyde quotes Eikhenbaum as saying that in novels where the plot alone is important, narrative tricks or devices are used merely as formal links between events, but when��skaz has a fundamental role to play in the novel, the narrator somehow appears in the foreground, as if the “pattern” is being used only for combining and connecting the various tricks of the skaz style. In such a novel, the emphasis is on elegance of diction and wordplay, and various kinds of pun. In such a narrative, not only does the narrator interrupt in order to address the reader directly, but the narrator’s use of language transforms to become the sort of language in which audio allusions acquire an importance far greater than the straightforward meaning of individual words. These are elements that are at the service of the comedy in Gogol’s novels, as they are in Pnin. [. . .]

There are numerous puns and plays on Pnin’s name that exemplify this (even in��Pale Fire). The first time Pnin introduces himself by telephone, the narrator tells us that it sounds like a “preposterous little explosion,” and Joan, to whom he is speaking, calls it “a cracked ping-pong ball, Russian.” On the most superficial level possible, Pnin’s name counts as an audio allusion that constantly attracts the reader’s attention.

The tour guide told us a story about how Gombrowicz��hated��Borges and would frequently, drunkenly, rant about just how crappy Borges was as a writer.������

“One time, when he was railing against Borges’s latest book, a drinking compatriot asked him if he had��read the book. ‘What?! Why would I waste my time on trash like that?’”��

*����

This anecdote came to mind tonight, as I was reading the opening chapter to Azar Nafisi’s��: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile, translated from the Persian by Lotfali Khonji.��

At a party for his students, he railed against Laurence Olivier’s film adaptation of��Hamlet. One student asked whether he had actually seen the film, and he replied: “Of course I haven’t seen the film. Do you think I would waste my time seeing a film as bad as I have described?”��

*��

Although it’s not actually in there, I can imagine a scene in Rodrigo Fresán’s��The Dreamed Part��in which the Author—after his attempt to merge with the so-called God particle at CERN in hopes of transforming himself into something otherworldly, capable of rewriting all of reality over and over again��to fit his aesthetic desires like some sort of nutty-professor version of David Haller—is lying in bed, unable to sleep, thus unable to dream, thus unable to write or live. (It’s all a bit complicated—just go with me for a moment.)��

I can imagine him lying there, delivering a most scathing��indictment of cell phones, Twitter, and our tendency to write more than we read (if we assume tweeting is “writing” and reading is something other than emoji-interpretation)��all while taking a massive shit on some second-rate contemporary writer. Like his��archnemesis,��IKEA.����

When he finished his diatribe, slightly out of breath, internally pleased with a few of his��darts, well aware that most of the audience was silently tweeting his comments out to the world with hashtags like #LOLAngryWriter or #OldAndOutofTouch��when someone asks him about IKEA’s latest best-seller: Has he read it?��

“Of course not. Why waste my time on a book like that when I could spend time with Nabokov’s��Transparent Things, the perfect book to read, reread, or re-reread while you’re here in Switzerland.”��

*��

Nafisi’s book is broken up into seven chapters,��each addressing one or more of Nabokov’s works, organized under a particular theme. Like “Cruelty:��Pnin.” Or “Heaven and Hell:��Ada or Ardor.” Most of the big books are all in here—Lolita��and��Pale Fire��and��The Gift—but there’s also��Look at the��Harelquins!��A late work that I’m guessing some readers haven’t really ever heard of, and a book that I bought at Fresán’s��urging when he was here in Rochester. I had read the title, but nothing more than that.��As much as I consider myself a Nabokov fan, there are a few books I just never got around to. (And a number that I read when I was too young, too silly.)����

Rodrigo sold me on this book—which I still haven’t read, but will before the summer is over—by showing me the��“Other Books by the Narrator” page where, instead of Nabokov’s actual titles, you find this:��

In Russian:��

Tamara��1925��

Pawn Takes Queen��1927��

Plenilune��1929��

Camera Lucida��(Slaughter in the Sun) 1931��

The Red Top Hat��1934��

The Dare��1950��

��

In English:��

See under Real��1939��

Esmeralda and Her��Parandrus��1941��

Dr. Olga��Repnin��1946��

Exile from��Mayda��1947��

A Kingdom by the Sea��1962��

Ardis��1970��

A��Nabokov-phile��will see through this. (Tamara��=��Mary;��Camera Lucida��=��The Eye;��Ardis��=��Ada;��Exile from��Mayda��=��Pale Fire.) What a very��Nabokovian��game!��According to Rodrigo—and the author in��The Dreamed Part—it’s basically Nabokov’s parody of what a��Nabokovian��novel��is.��He’s re-writing himself. His books. His go-to anecdotes and narrative tricks. (Not that Nabokov really repeated himself all that often. It’s one of the things that makes him such a lasting��author,��so rewarding to reread.)��

*��

I’m definitely going to use this anecdote from chapter one of Nafisi’s book—“Life:��Speak, Memory”—which might be common knowledge, but which I hadn’t come across before now:����

During a lecture in Minnesota, when he had forgotten his notes and was forced to ad-lib, he gave his students a quiz on the approaches that distinguish a good reader. There are ten definitions, and the students had to choose a combination of four:��

��1.) The reader should belong to a book club.

2.) The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.��

3.) The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.��

4.) The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.��

5.) The reader should have seen the book in a movie.��

6.) The reader should be a budding author.��

7.) The reader should have imagination.��

8.) The reader should have memory.��

9.) The reader should have a dictionary.��

10.) The reader should have some artistic sense. ��

In Nabokov’s view, the readers should have imagination, memory, a dictionary, and an artistic sense.��

100% agree.����

*��

Due to a quirk of how we produced Fresán’s follow-up to the Best Translated Book Award-winning The Invented Part, I ended up spending between 7 and 8 hours a day every day last week proofing this forthcoming monster. A mere 543 pages in 6” x 9” format (probably something like 225,000 words?), ��isn’t��a book you can skim. It’s a book that—if you’re going to proof it properly—you need to pay attention��constantly. Not just to the individual sentences (paraphrasing here: “It’s like Nabokov said, ‘what’s wrong with making a reader reread a sentence or two?’”) but to��all the references.��So many names! Rodrigo’s mind is��encyclopedic��in a way that makes the Internet look like an��ABC book. And taking it upon myself to do the best job possible—when you find a typo, don’t tell me; I need to live with the common proofreader delusion that I’m really good at this, remembering everything I found and never knowing about everything I missed—I looked up��everything. Every name. Every word that looked like it��might��be misspelled. (Spoiler: After an hour of proofing,��every single word looks misspelled.)��

And I hunted down every quote that I could find. All the bits from��Wuthering��Heights��(this section is AMAZING), the lines from Susan Sontag’s intro to��Halldor��Laxness’s��Under the��Glacier,��and��the parts referencing��Nabokov’s��Transparent Things.��

Well, actually, on Saturday, I decided to celebrate my proofing accomplishment (shhhhhhh!!! I missed NOTHING) by taking a 45 mile��round-trip bike ride to a brewery in Brockport, NY (you think Rochester is the boonies?), where had a couple beers and just read Transparent Things from cover to cover. What a book!��

*��

Back to Nafisi:��

Nabokov’s last novels were received more tepidly than the others, and��Transparent Things, which came out in 1972, baffled many critics, among them John Updike. In Nabokov’s opinion, “Amongst the reviewers several careful readers have published some beautiful stuff about it. Yet neither they nor, of course, the common ‘criticule’ discerned the structural knot of the story.”��Look at the Harlequins!��Was published two years later and was similarly greeted with review that were split between his keen readers and “hacks” who found it less taxing than��Ada��or��Transparent Things.��

Let’s pause for a second on “criticule.” It’s like the BuzzWire��Listmaker��of the 1970s!��Criticule. So dismissive in such a��dickish, erudite way.����

*��

In terms of it’s basic story [SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE SPOILER-AVERSE��WHO ARE ACTUALLY PLANNING TO ACTUALLY READ THIS NOVEL]����isn’t necessarily convoluted.��It’s about Hugh Person returning to Switzerland for the fourth time in his life—and first since his wife died. We read about his earlier trips—the first in which his dad passed away, the second for his work as an editor in which he meets his future wife—and then��find out that, off-screen, he strangled his wife in his sleep. (His somnambulism was established early on in the book.) Also off-screen: He goes to jail for murder but is exonerated and spends a number of years in an asylum. He no longer works as an editor.��The big-name author he worked with most—a very pretentious character who Nabokov has way too much fun with, having him title his book Tralatitions��and embody the truly��pervy��part of Humbert Humbert—passes away.����

All that is straightforward. But the “structural knot,” at least as��far as The Author in��The Dreamed Part��articulates it, is in the narration.��Who is/are the voices at the beginning and end who are telling this story? Are they ghosts from beyond? The author? A��collective of writerly spirits?����

When��we��concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!����

Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert in themselves but much used by careless life (you are thinking, and quite rightly so, of a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals have scurried in the course of incalculable��seasons) are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus: novices fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this stone, of that heath. I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment.����

That “more in a moment” is the most Fresán-esque��sentence I’ve ever read in a���ԴDz�-������á����book.��I’m so glad that I read this book.��

*��

Rodrigo Fresán. Azar Nafisi. Dubravka Ugresic. Lila��Azam��Zanganeh. All writers I really like who have, more or less recently, written books that involved Nabokov in one way or another.��Which makes me want to a) read their books (which I have, minus Nafisi’s), and b) read all the��weird��Nabokov books that aren’t taught in World Lit 101.��And the ones that are known, but aren’t��Lolita��or��Pnin��or��Pale Fire. Books like��Bend Sinister��that I read while working at Quail Ridge Books, right after finishing��The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.��(Which I read in concordance with��The Real Life of Alejandro��Mayta��by Mario Vargas Llosa as some sort of self-imposed nerdy compare-and-contrast exercise.)��I want to reread those,��because rereading is sort of like rewriting—I have the chance to take a set of memories and rework them in ways that are more visual,��richer, more complete and��detailed and fulfilling.����

*��

This weekend, I want to go on a 50+ mile bike ride.��It’s part of my personal mid-life health crisis. I had to stop running for a while because I fucked up��my knee. Again. It’s always cyclical. Feel so good, run��20 miles a few weeks in a row, dive into a pool, feel a pinch, limp for days. Get strong. Run again. Hope that it will help with the extra weight.��Push yourself. Break down. Try again.����

For the rest of the summer, I decided to bike to break my cycle. (Ugh. #PunEverything?)��My knee never hurts after riding, no matter how far I go, no matter how far I push myself, and this will sort of kind of keep me sort of kind of in shape?����

To give me a bit of added motivation, I’ve been biking to breweries around the area for a beer and lunch, and to read a bit before biking the return route. Thankfully, there are breweries�� now. And they all put a lot of effort into their name and brand and design. I go to (yeah, I know) a lot because I like their logo. And then there’s , which is right around the corner from my house and has always embraced a stoner aesthetic. (Their flagship beer is “The Kind,” because obviously.) plays off of the 70-foot-high embankment that was created for the Erie Canal AND because every work of art follows one of seven plots.

And then, there’s Rising Storm, which is 26 miles away (perfect for my upcoming ride) and sounds like something that you’d either see on a college basketball warm-up jersey or at a white supremacist rally.

That’s a joke I’ve told four times today, and I’m sure I’ll repeat it to unwitting interlocutors after my bike ride, when I’m telling and retelling and reimagining my Rising Storm experiences as if life is fiction, as if life is��nothing more than a narrative to be shaped and shared with that exclusive group of compatriots who have: imagination, memory, a dictionary, and an artistic sense.��

But isn’t that the way to be human? The idea of “being inhuman” is captivating to me, and I always think being inhuman as reacting instinctually, absorbing what happens to you without reflection, without letting these experiences be adopted through our imagination. We become more human the more we retell, reread, rethink, rework. Editing is a way of expanding one’s consciousness. Rereading is the only way to really start to understand everything that’s not��on the surface.��As is telling the same joke 40 times until you figure out the right comedic beats. ��

*��

If I were The Author from��The Invented Part��and��The Dreamed Part, I would probably work in a bit about��how the appeal of��our “Golden Age of Television” is��partially due to the fact that no one wants to reread anymore. Not only do a lot of people listen to podcasts at time-and-a-half to get through them quicker, but they also watch these “prestige” shows on slow fast-forward, with the subtitles on.��CRAM IT IN YOUR BRAIN. Details and depth don’t matter; everything is a box to be ticked, a product to have consumed.����

Relive, rework, reread, rewrite. It’s all in the retelling.��

And a genius like Fresán/Nafizi/Nabokov/Ugresic can transform that cliché into something layered and beautiful, written in a way that makes you reflect, that makes you more human.

*��

I’m excited to revisit Nabokov through Nafisi’s lens. She’s an incredible thinker, and I love the perspective that she lays out in the intro as to why Nabokov:��

This was why my students ignored most socially committed novels but love Nabokov—not because they were not politically committed, but because Nabokov’s fiction��did not merely question politics of the day but went far beyond that to put on trial all forms of tyrannical mindset. [. . .]��

Worse still, the individuality that Nabokov and so many great American writers had cherished here has been vanishing alongside the public spaces that created bridges between our private and public selves—connecting us to others, helping in the creation of communities that offer a sense of belonging and loyalty without compromising individual integrity. That individualism has been gradually replaced by the solipsism that Nabokov so beautifully evoked in his best work, as the��archvillain��of his stories.��Surely “absurd,” with all its tragic connotations, is an apt term to apply to an age identified with Donald Trump. [. . .]��

In book after book,��Pnin, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Pale Fire,��and��Ada, the villains��are the solipsists, those who for one reason or another are too self-involved to hear, see, or feel empathy for others, those who impose not just their will but their prefabricated images and ideas upon real living human beings.��These new and compelling monsters are among Nabokov’s great contributions to modern fiction. [. . .]��

If only there were more hours in the day, weeks left in the summer before the new semester. Although if I time this right, maybe I can finally undertake Ada or Ardor��over winter break. Seems like the right book to bring to . . .