Michael Wood on Nabokov, NP (was: Re: The Apprenticeship of Thomas Pynchon)

[André Buys]

>Michael Wood, author of ''Stendhal'' and ''America in the Movies,'' is a professor of 
>English at the University of Exeter.

He is also the author of "The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction", 
which I thought really excellent. It added enormously to my understanding of 
Nabokov, which had admittedly been shallow enough. Just to give you a taste: on 
"Pale Fire", often mentioned here of late, he writes:

    Kinbote may say more than he wants to when he speaks of `that carrousel 
    inside and outside my head.' A misprint--or rather an instruction to the printer,
    as in "Lolita"--appears at the very moment he is describing his scholarly 
    diligence, and that of the `professional proofreader' he has employed. As with 
    the mistranslation of Tolstoy in "Ada", the joke is on the general sloppiness 
    but also goes further: Kinbote can't concentrate, the bald but perturbed 
    academic apparatus actually offers us the image of a mind in trouble, rather 
    as Pierre Menard's bibliography is a sketch of his quirky intellect. We 
    arrive at the pictures--of Kinbote and Menard--by joining up the dots.

back to lurker mode,

Nicole Slagter
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