Nabokov's Signs and Symbols

[John Bailey]

Nabokov's first story published in the New Yorker in 1948 is a tiny
little piece that seems to me very relevant to readers of Pynchon.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/05/15/symbols-and-signs
He told the fiction editor that “a second (main) story is woven into,
or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one,” although from
my reading this could be a tease, since there's such a heavy
metafictional layer exploring our tendencies to "project a world"
(COL49) when we're reading. Plus it tied in neatly to the discussion
of weather in books had here recently, and Nabokov might be satirising
the idea that climate is a conspiracy based on our mood.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l