"the bridge between Vladimir Nabokow and David Foster Wallace"

[Becky Lindroos]

And when you get down into which book is “best” the reader is the functional decider, imo.  I personally preferred the cognitive draw of Pale Fire to the hermetic poetics of Lolita (even if PF has the Cantos,  and Ada or Ardor has the great sentences, and Speak, Memory does some excellent metaphorical sequences.  - lol).  

Bekah 


On Oct 27, 2014, at 6:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> GR lacks Nabokov's  sometimes-hermetic beauty and Wallace's sometimes depthless affective ness. 
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On Oct 27, 2014, at 5:54 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> And yet, there is some truth, half truth perhaps,  in what the
>> reviewer says. Isn't there? If it were utter trash we wouldn't bother
>> trashing it. Right? One might reject the comparison out right. It's
>> boring or useless. But there is something there in this:
>> 
>> "GR lacks Nabokov's beauty and Wallace's affectiveness."
>> 
>> Maybe.
>> 
>> On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 9:34 AM, Heikki Raudaskoski
>> <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Pale Fire came up on the list, once again. This brought to mind the
>>> review of the Finnish translation of GR, "Painovoiman sateenkaari",
>>> that came out a month ago in Helsingin Sanomat, the leading Finnish
>>> newspaper. http://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/a1411741137138
>>> 
>>> When one reads the uniformly poor review, it becomes obvious that the
>>> reviewer hasn't really read either the original or the translation.
>>> He has very little to say about GR itself.
>>> 
>>> At one point he writes, in a quite patronizing tone, that GR is "said
>>> to form [by whom, I wonder] the bridge between Vladimir Nabokov and
>>> David Foster Wallace". Heh heh.
>>> 
>>> The reviewer has in mind the novels Pale Fire, Ada, and Infinite Jest.
>>> Nabokov and Wallace are his favorites, not Pynchon: GR lacks Nabokov's
>>> beauty and Wallace's affectiveness. (AFAIK, the guy is working on a
>>> longer study on Wallace, so he may have some vested interest to set up
>>> the boring confrontation between TRP and DWF again.)
>>> 
>>> What doesn't surprise me at all is that they chose a clown like him to
>>> review GR. The standard of literary reviews in HS is low nowadays.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Heikki
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l