Morgan > Recent Status Updates

Def some magical realism going on

Roaming the streets of San Francisco getting no closer to solving the mystery.

I can’t keep track of all the weird one-off characters.

They just cut off Hippolyte’s leg. I’m gonna have to DNF this book for the medical trauma content. Didn’t know this was a trigger of mine.

Will read a summary and maybe the ending and that’s it.

Ok so now Emma’s been seduced by a rake.

Chapter 5

Part 2

Mandatory readying according to VN. A slow start focusing on Charles - why did Flaubert do that? It doesn’t really suck you in.

Things are heating up. What will become of Sandy?

This is gonna be a funny book.

Ultima Thule? Alders, mauve, “when I think of those I love…”(this book) echoing “whenever I start thinking of my love for a person… (Speak, Memory), and “process at work behind commonplace reality” and the “secret arranger of chance events” echoing all of Nabokov.

He’s so obviously influenced by VN, but I only see where he falls short. Maybe this isn’t his best book.

Is this guy consciously aping Nabokov? He’s doing a bad job of it.

Is this contemporary fiction? Confessional, sincere, no indication there’s a plot afoot, why is this person narrating?

Sounds very Nabokovian so far

Take 2 on this behemoth

Chapter 4, the life of Chernyshevski. This will go on for almost 100 pages.

The book thus far: Poet Fyodor leads an unstructured life in Berlin, and we follow him for 2+ years as he moves, falls in love, tries writing various things, and mingles now and then with the other emigrés around him.

Fyodor and Zina have gotten together now. Always a bit unrealistic, VN’s couples. He’s better at writing weirdos than humdrum romance. Or is the problem me, and I’m pushing too much of my own notions of being in love onto his story?

Awesome passage pg 163-164. “I am simply a poor young Russian selling the surplus from a gentleman’s upbringing while scribbling verses in my spare time.”

Love the moments when VN does a callback or a circular story. The beginning is the end, etc. One such moment at the end of Father’s section in Ch 2.

In Chapter 2 now. Protag with a vigorous imagination. Transitions are all masterful, dissolving. Long paragraphs. Some great moments: the trip back to Leshino pg 25, Yasha’s story, the imaginary dialogue that closes Chapter 1.

I treasure every page of this last of VN’s novels that I will ever have the pleasure of reading for the first time.

Reading because VN loved this

To Time and Ebb

To Orache