The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction

by Michael Wood

As a child in Russia, Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed "I loved doing simple tricks--turning water into wine, that kind of thing." In this engrossing book Michael Wood explores the blend of arrogance and mischief that makes Nabokov such a fascinating and elusive master of fiction. Wood argues that Nabokov is neither the aesthete he liked to pretend to be nor the heavy-handed moralist recent critics make him. Major works like Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada appear in a new light, but there are also chapters on earlier works, like the Real Life of Sebastian Knight ; on selected short stories; and on the translation of Eugene Onegin, as well as detailed discussions of Nabokov's ideas of literature, memory, pity, and pain.


The book comes fully to terms with Nabokov's blend of playfulness and seriousness, delving into the real delight of reading him and the odd disquiet that lurks beneath that pleasure. Wood's speculations spin outward to illuminate the ambiguities and aspirations of the modern novel, and to raise the question of how we uncover "the author" in a work, without falling into the obvious biographical traps. The Magician's Doubts slices through the dustier conventions of criticism and never loses sight of the emotional and sensual pleasure of reading.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Criticism, Nonfiction

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Michael Wood born in Lincoln, England, is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Professor of comparative literature at Princeton University. He is an alumnus of St John's College, Cambridge.

Prior to teaching to Princeton, he taught at Columbia University, and at the University of Exeter in Devon, England.

He was Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton from 1995-2001, and chaired Princeton's English department from 1998 to 2004. He writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and on film for the London Review of Books.

Reviews

[Uday · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is simply magnificent, and literary criticism at its best, and packed with exemplary level of closely-reading. If academic writing has to survive, it must, first of all write as engagingly as this, not consider instinct as anathema, combine close observation along with wider modes of analysis, and for god's sake eschew the droll, turgid, virtually algorithmic prose that they so perversely prize.

[Franc · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book new in 1995 to be my guide on an ambitiously planned journey thru all Nabokov's English works. I'd come across it in a review that noted Wood's stated goal was to engage in “an intense, even intimate dialogue with provocative texts” and provide “a report on the adventure of reading.” This trip, however, was postponed many times for many reasons, and the book patiently remained in mint condition there on the shelf. Finally after a 20-year delay, I embarked last year on my "adventure in reading", and as I'd hoped, Michael Wood was indeed a perfect companion and sherpa, enhancing my understanding of the individual works as well as Nabokov's overriding themes. The 20 or 30 pages he spends with each book are self-contained essays, which make excellent Afterwards for a first read, and better Forwards for a reread. Wood builds on the previous work done by Brian Boyd in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years with the same clear, enthusiasm. It is a convincing critical work, which seems to be targeted more towards the laity than the academy.

[Chris Fellows · Rating 4 out of 5]

It made me want to (re)read Nabokov - very much; and it made me want to write multilayered works with unreliable narrators - very much. So in those respects it is a very good book.

It has an episodic structure, with each chapter being a self-contained essay on one of Nabokov's works in English. In that respect the title - which seemed to me to promise an organised scholarly polemic - is misleading. As a consequence of this misunderstanding I was disappointed by the lack of a formal conclusion; the book simply trails off at the end of the last episode in a way I found unsatsifactory.

The other thing that irritated me enough to make me lay the book down for half a day was Wood's assertion that a student's statement that when reading he "skips bit so as not to be influenced by the author" was a self-evidently ridiculous statement, rather than a clumsy outline of a perfectly rational strategy for constructing valid readings of a text. Garfield minus Garfield, anyone?

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

This weekend I was reading a few of Nabokov's Collected Stories, and turned back to Wood's inspired reading of Nabokov's novels. According to my inscription in the front of the book, I first read it in October 1995 - and I seem to have forgotten all of it, which isn't so bad since I got to read it again. After my recent re-read of Pale Fire, I'm impressed by Wood's analysis: he moves beyond the usual marveling at Nabokov's chess-puzzle plots, wicked genius, synesthetic vocabulary, etc. and puts his finger on the pulse of pain, the "demons of pity" that haunt his work. As much as I appreciate Brian Boyd and Michael Maar, Wood's book is a marvel of its own.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anna you have to read this. Such a wonderful critical effort, skillfully literary-biographical.