I started it last spring when I went to NYC for vacation. Read it on the bus on the way there, then I thought I lost the copy for good. Luckily it was unearthed amid the general displacements of moving out of my old apartment.

I'm about a 150 pages in. I think it might be a good smaller, bit-by-bit type of reading experience. I do enjoy having some outside material to take refuge in when schoolwork starts to crowd my brain. A couple stories a week on the train? Some lazy afternoon weekend reading? Why the hell not?

Nabokov's one of those guys who I admire from afar. Sure I read Lolita, and of course it's superb. I've poked around elsewhere in his collected works and I think I'm going to wade into his stuff little by little. Not so much out of intimidation, mind, but more because I have the feeling that when I get into him it'll be all-consuming.

There are a few things I've sort of held off on getting into, simply to respectfully wait to open space in my mind until I can appreciate them fully. This applies to Nabokov equally as much as it does Elvis Costello, old timey country music, The Meters, Duke Ellington, Charlie Chaplin, Indian cuisine, sushi, War and Peace, Don Quixote, Hegel, Proust, and homemade cocktails. It might seem like a long list but there's plenty of life to live, isn't there?

***

Ok, long breath...now it's finished. It took me awhile to get through all of it, but as of yesterday this collection is toast.

A couple of thoughts, right off the bat:

* I don't particularly like the "collected stories" framework. It's daunting and somewhat intimidating to have 6-700 pages of story after story in one's hands. Years and years of work and the many detailed layers of plot, character, voice, and so on are bundled up only to be made more dense and somewhat less palatable, like stacks of carrots in the supermarket. Give that prose some room to breathe!

I think I'd much prefer having single collections of short stories, which are more hit-or-miss for me in general, as a reader. I usually check to see if the short story is *actually* short, i.e. less than 50 pages or so. I don't do short stories that stretch to novella-length. Unless, of course, they are exceptionally gripping...

* I think Poe was right about this, if nothing else, that short stories should be read in one sitting. This isn't just about length of story, it's also about how engaging it is. One of the greatest things about literature (for me, as for a lot of people) is it's capacity to take you to another world. I don't want a short story to drag, no one does, but for some reason when and if this happens, it's somehow more annoying than when a novel does. I expect novels to be occasionally dull or uninteresting, I understand how difficult it would be to sustain every reader's interest in anything for 200, 300, 400, 500 pages. I get that; it's not quite my problem with short stories.

I find that if a short story I'm reading isn't working for me I'm sort of trapped- I'm a stickler for finishing books I start, if for no other reason than pride and the nagging feeling that the book might pick up a bit at the end or something. I need a short story to really work for me, pretty much off the bat...it's kind of entitled and maybe a bit unfair but that's how my reading habits seem to go.


So, on to the issue of Nabokov himself. I honor him, I respect his sophistication and consummate skill with words, images, sentiments, etc. His taste is incredible. Never overdoes it, always notices the essential minor detail of a person's clothing, face, spatial position, etc. He's that way philosophically, too- he never misses a beat with registering a quirk of fate, unevenness of character, complex, ironic situation, etc. The back cover refers to his "connesieur's sampling of the table of human folly" and I thought about that many times after I started repeatedly dipping into the text. Nothing's lost on Mr. Nabokov, of this I am sure. Henry James would have nodded his approval; Hemingway would have surely grunted in approval of V.N.'s shite detector.

The man's got...sensibility. I have a feeling that he would be fascinating to meet in person. Composed, scrupulously curteous, witty, engaging, and yet with a deep, ironic, elegant reserve where strange images and memories might be bubbling.

Martin Amis, a writer and reader I respect tremendously and who certainly knows his Nabokov frontwards and back, likes to make the analogy of writing with being a host. Do you prepare for your guests? Bring out the fine china? Sweep the rug? Buy good booze or tons of the cheap stuff? Do you even bother with them? I think it's a really interesting idea and I can see what he means. The author is 'hosting' the reader in a way. You spend perhaps a great deal of time in his or her company, they show you around, all that kind of thing. They guide you and they focus your attention and try to make you experience something worthwhile, pleasurable or funny or whatever.

Amis says that if you visited Mr. Nabokov he would fuss over you. Prosaically, he sits you in his favorite chair and offers you his best wine and cigars. I like this notion, and I can see it at work here. It's kind of what I meant about being well-mannered and tasteful before. One can open up the book and find something beautifully well-turned on pretty much every page. In terms of sheer writing, just perfectly arranged language and exquisite imagery, the man is puttin' down.

Mailer once made a really insightful comment on the "tensile strength" of a sentence...I think it's a physics term about how pressure is distributed on an object or somthing, it's about tension and force...I don't remember, exactly, but the guy got a degree from Harvard in engineering before he wrote about a million sentences so hopefully he's on to something. Nabokov's sentences have that perfect weight, time and again he never loses his balance. His poise is impeccable. It's a very rare trait, if you think about it, in both literature and life.

I think the reason why I just didn't take to this book (after deliberating a bit I'm sticking with 3 stars) has to do with the sheer density of pages, certainly, but it also has to do with the staggering amount of good stuff here. I didn't take to every story but the ones that I did were pretty breathtaking- pellucid, engaging, wise.

I think what it is is that Nabokov is just too...adult for me, shall we say. He is SO sophisticated, erudite and streetwise, SUCH an immaculate stylist that turning hundreds of pages makes me feel like I'm sort of eating chocolate chip after chip after chocolate chip until the sum total is sort of a big, black, gooey, sweet mess. I wouldn't blame this on Nabokov himself, certainly not his fault he's so rarefied and I doubt that quality might be called a "fault", either. It's just that going through all this prose became rather burdensome- there was so much of it, and so much to enjoy and appreciate that taking it in steadily became engorging.

To get back to the ambiguous use of the word "adult" I don't mean I want my prose writers to be immature. Far from it. I just mean that Nabokov's prose is appropriately nape-tingling (as he felt all good prose must be) but also as polished as a new hard wood floor, almost embalmed in wax. I get antsy around crisply decorated spaces- floors, kitchens, museums, bathrooms, etc. I prefer a little lived-in feeling than a decorative pristine.

It's similar in my aesthetic tastes, too. I like it when works are filled with the tension between opposites: coherence vs. incoherence, form and impression, plain speech and flourid eloquence...I like it when my art is a fragile if firm stay against chaos or just a change of form in and of itself. Think of bebop, if you want to hear it in musical terms. I don't want controlled chaos as much as I want the open window in the church, the rigorous scholarship amid the drunken improvisation and the obscene gesture in the midst of the erudite exegesis. I like a little risk for the author, as well as a risk for the reader.

I don't quite think Nabokov is too polite, it's just that I think he executes something extremely well, and I sort of have to step on my tippytoes to reach it, let alone peek over the height. Lolita very much has the qualities I'm talking about, at least in the sense that it constantly walks the line between its outrageous premise and its bewitching, intoxicating language.

Nabokov's prose is a little too...pristine, for me. When read in fragments it's succulent; in bulk its suffocating. Next thing I read of his (and there will definitely be more, don't you worry about that) should be a shorter piece. I don't think he's pretentious or showing off. I just think it's a difference in taste.

All in all, I enjoyed and profited from having read this book, and I would very much like to revisit it but I don't think it spoke to me as openly as I'd imagined it would. I listed Nabokov among the tastes I hope to aquire in all the different avenues of life and so it remains, albeit a little less so now. My ignorance is dimmed, though perhaps not diminished. Lord knows, it would take more than one 600 page book to do that...

I'm not worthy!