On Nabokov's Talking

[Steelhead]

hag quoth Will, inquiring:
>> " -- how many writers were (are) better than Nabokov?"

then hag engages in not so subtle hyperbole, before
>and Steely names around 1735 writers

getting to the point:
>hey - all better than Nabokov?? and Steely - you mention Gordimer,
>but what do you think of Coetzee?

Coetzee, I like what I've read: Waiting for the Barbarians and Michael K.
I wish I'd read more. I'm checking out for a week in the redwoods (Del Norte
and Humboldt Counties) so maybe I'll take Coetzee along. Perhaps the one on
Dostoevski--I just finished reading The Demons. Wow.

Speaking of SA scribes, I also like Breytan Breytenbach: Notes of an Albino
Terrorist, or something like that. Been awhile since I read him. As far as
African writers go I also love Amos Tutolo's Palm-Wine Drunkard, anything
by the calm Chinua Achibe and the late Ken Saro-Wiwa's amazing Nigerian
novel Sozzaboy.

Is everyone on my list "better than Nabokov?" Nope. But close. And they're
all--unlike the quaintly hatted Mr. Wallace, in my sophomoric opinion--up
to something...There's a subversive subtext to their writing, an assault on
entrenched power, that is both dangerous and vital.

At least this is what rates for me. I got the same--or more--pleasure and
enlightenment out of reading each of them as I did Nabokov. To which list I
would now add the remarkable Phillip Kerr's Berlin Noir
trilogy...spoo--ook-eey. Noir Rules! But, as TP points out in Vineland, it
too has become rigorously routinized and savagely malled.

Off to Vineland the Real,

Steely