Next Nabokov?

Transparent Things is one of his trickier, shorter novels that's worth your time.

Speak, Memory is nice, as I recall. Ada seemed impenetrable. Mary, his first novel, is trash.

God, the one about people watching self-referential movies is pretty swell. Darned if I can remember.

i think i bought one called glory is it good.

i am starting lolita t2owoo-day.

Ada. My favorite, after Lolita. Masterpiece.

I thought this thread was going to be about predicting what current writer is in the running be "the next Nabokov."

I have dutifully read almost everything he's written, but I've never gotten much enjoyment out of the translated ones (Glory; King, Queen, Knave; The Gift). Ada and Pale Fire and Pnin and Lolita are all about the same to me in terms of fun (though Pnin is the lightest and easiest of them).

My sentimental favorite--one of the books I would take with me to the proverbial desert island--is the vastly underrated Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

It's the first book he wrote in English, and as such the prose is often charmingly straightforward--it doesn't suffer from as much of the pun-thick language and multiple layers of allusion that make something like Ada a bit slow in places.

At the same time, it's got plenty of philosophical and metafictional play in it. I think it's ultimately VVN's most humane and gentle book, but it's also funny and profound in how it looks at issues of identity and art and knowledge and pain.

I like Sebastian Knight too. I pretty much agree with your whole post, except I never got around to reading Ada.

xpost:
Actually, I feel like mentioning that I had a high school English teacher who was always putting Nabokov down, presumably because of John Gardner's negative comments in On Moral Fiction. That didn't stop us from reading him, though.

is lolita a hard read. maybe it should be my work book. that is, the book i read at work, during lunch hour.

oh dear, what a terrible exclusion. that should say, should NOT be my work book, etc.

Ken, John Gardner is a reactionary and he hates fun. He's a pretty good writer but I resent the choke-hold his ideas have on the creative writing industry.

The message that the author should not call attention to himself or herself is probably good advice to college sophomores in their first creative writing 101 class. But it would be a mistake to extend that to retrospectively downgrading Nabokov, Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, etc.--all of whom made works of undisputed genius that incorporate lots plenty of self-referential authorial play.

Agreed. But do you mean to tell me people are still reading that book? I thought even knowing about it was enough to show that I was a relic from a different age.

Not sure what different age you speak of, Ken, but my own personal feelings about Gardner and the creative-writing industrial complex date from the late 80s.

Given the durability and entrenchment of the CWIC, I suspect that the Gardnerian aesthetic is still alive and well on today's campuses. But that's another thread.

Thanks to everyone for the recommendations!

As to who could be the next Nabokov, if the criterion is a writer of English as a second language, then the first to spring to mind is Aleksandar Hemon. The first paragraph of Nowhere Man:

"Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt of being someone else, with a little creature burrowed in my body, clawing at the walls inside my chest - a recurring nightmare. But I was awake, listening to the mizzle in my pillow, to the furniture furtively sagging, to the house creaking under the wind assaults. I straightened my legs, so the blanket ebbed and my right foot rose out of the sludge of darkness like a squat extinguished lighthouse. The blinds gibbered for a moment, commenting on my performance, then settled in silence."

I'm not sure he savors the words as well as Nabokov (Nabokov's words are a storm bending trees and creasing puddles, while Hemon's are more puffs of air blowing a feather along the edge of a table), but you can certainly see a similar style.

If the criteria extended beyond English as a second language, I'm afraid we'd all have a million different nominees.

in my experience 'college' writing classes tell you to cut out words and write in 5 paragraph form. clarity is the essence of beauty. and beauty, is the essence of WATER, which is the essence of life.

you are also supposed to use transition words like next, secondly, thirdly, and finally. NOW when writing fiction the rules change. you are not supposed to use adverbs.

strange my post seems to have disappeared. what i'd said was, to 'clarify' (hmhee), wetness = essence of beauty AND water ergo water = beauty (and) life (and)...CLARITY. now put that down flip it & reverse it.

i added, as evidence, that this is why water can be sold at such exhorbitant prices - our thirst for it is MORE than a primal survival urge.