Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "nabokov"

I should start by noting that I won David Schmahmann’s The Double Life of Alfred Buber as a Library Thing early reviewer. Usually, I can tell pretty quickly whether I like a book or not, but this was one of those rare cases in which it was not easy to form an opinion. This was, at least in part, because I read the bound galleys, which were in need of some editing. And the publisher’s comparison to Nabokov, which we’ve all seen before, may have on some readers (like myself) the opposite effect: “Oh, no! Another Nabokov?” Having said this, I should also add that it was clear from the beginning the Schmahmann is a serious writer.

The comparison with Lolita is justified by the narrator’s infatuation with a girl twenty years younger than he, and by a certain tone of the confession. But Buber’s Lolita is, of course, a creature of our times: she is a young prostitute in Thailand, and Buber is himself a very introspective, complex intellectual, who constantly analyzes himself and the others. He is, in fact, a Proustian character, a romantic, though an ironic one, of course. What saves Schmahmann’s novel from being a cheap thrill or a poor pastiche of Nabokov is the fact that his narrator is truly interesting (and I am using this word in its deepest sense); he has a mind and sensibility that stay with you long after you finish the novel. I am a reader who is interested more than anything in the author’s mind and sensibility, and Buber’s creator seems to me at least as intriguing as Buber. The novel has many paragraphs that are stylistically beautiful and it is, generally, intellectually engaging.

Piperno’s The Worst Intentions (Europa Editions, 2007) has been compared, with some justification, to Ph. Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In fact, Piperno’s novel is better. As a big reader of Proust (I had read all the volumes of A la Recherche… by the time I was 22, and wrote my BA thesis on it) I can say that this is the closest equivalent to Proust’s masterpiece. I usually don’t like such comparisons because they are rarely founded, and even when they are, they indicate that the author of the “equivalent” is no more than a talented epigone. But what makes the comparison to Proust justified in this case is not only the fact that Piperno has deeply absorbed the work of his predecessor—a French scholar, he is the author of a work of literary criticism, Proust Anti-Jew—but also the fact that his novel is extremely contemporary. It is an updated version of Proust in the sense that it gives us a remarkable portrayal of Italian “high” society from the fifties until 2001. The snobbery of this society, while reminiscent of the old-fashion mannerisms of Mme Verdurin’s and Mme de Guermantes’s inner circles, is at the same time very contemporary. Piperno’s snobs are universal because any high-school student who wishes to be “popular” can recognize himself/herself in them; and yet, they are so…Italian. Never before have I read a novel whose protagonists are so concerned with appearance, especially fashion.

Another Proustian element of the novel is the construction of desire (with its corollary, jealousy and/or envy). Daniel, the half-Jewish narrator—who later becomes the author of a successful book with a provocative view on the Jews—is hopelessly in love with the most beautiful, the richest and most popular girl in his school, Gaia. Gaia is a cross between Nabokov’s Lolita and Proust’s Odette—inaccessible (though, as in Proust, it turns out that she is inaccessible only for the narrator, and quite accessible for the others), very desirable and very shallow (the narrator compares her to Britney Spears).

What I find amazing about The Worst Intentions, a novel written in long, complicated, Proustian sentences (translated with sophistication by Ann Goldstein), is that it was a best-seller in Italy.