Posted by Steven
on 18/4/2009, 11:04:14, in reply to "Re: Petersburg"
76.187.98.74
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: I didn't know that about Bloom. Where'd you read that?
From his essay on Lolita in Novelists and Novels. Here are some quotes:
"Lolita, baroque and subtle, is a book written to be reread, but whether its continued force matches the intricacy of its design seems to me problematic. Little is gained for Nabokov by comparing him to Sterne or to Joyce. Borges, who was essentially a parodist, is an apter parallel to Nabokov. Perhaps parodists are fated to resent Sigmund Freud; certainly Borges and Nabokov are the modern writers who most consistently and ignorantly abuse Freud."
"Where Nabokov hardly can be overpraised is in his achievement as a stylist."
"What Nabokov offers, in Ada as well as Lolita, is an almost pure revel in language, by no means necessarily allied with insight."
"Nabokov compares weakly to Proust, his most daunting predecessor. Lolita gives us Marcel as Humbert and Albertine as Lolita, which is to replace a sublime temporal pathos by a parodistic cunning that unfortunately keeps reminding us how much we have lost when we turn from Proust to Nabokov."
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