heard pronouncing “Nabokov” like how Sting says it in the Police song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” NAH-bah-kov. It outed him. Coetzee, Barthelme, those were tells. That he was not one of them. Why hasn’t anyone ever corrected me? It’s tricky, he explained. You don’t want to be the kind of person who corrects someone’s pronunciation, it would be uncomfortable for anyone, and here the racial dimension complicated the question in a very violent way. Besides, he thought there was a kind of condescension in it, a subconscious need to always have an outsider among them to remind them what they were
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