Morgan > Recent Status Updates

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

9 Beneficence
10 Details of a Sunset
11 The Thunderstorm
12 La Veneziana
13 Bachmann
14 The Dragon
15 Christmas
16 A letter that never reached Russia
17 The Fight
18 The Return of Chorb
19 A Guide to Berlin
20 A Nursery Tale
21 Terror
22 Razor
23 The Passenger
24 The Doorbell

Read up to

1 The Wood-Sprite
2 Russian Spoken Here
3 Sounds <- Great
4 Wingstroke
5 Gods
6 A Matter of Chance <- Great
7 The Seaport
8 Revenge
9 Beneficence
10 Details of a Sunset
11 The Thunderstorm

Thank god I’m back with Nab. I’m in safe hands. Little fool Franz, stormy Martha, dreamy Dreyer. And Berlin in the 20’s, the KaDeWe, the sense of the city. Thank god I’m back.

Omg amazing our little fool of a main character has broken his glasses. I love VN’s little twists of the knife.

giving up

God what a slog

Many many problems with this novel. Perhaps the structure is great. Apologia are numerous. But I cannot help but think that the critics of the past 2 centuries were right: the author overplays a didactic hand, creates an implausible scenario that is unconvincing even in the world of her own creation, and the ending sucks. Will finish just for Nab's commentary.

Not loving it tbh. Edmund total stick in the mud. Fanny absolutely silent. Gonna power through to read Nabokov’s commentary on it.

A number of alarming things I’ve noticed so far: this is gonna be one of those “who is everyone gonna marry” books. Where is the humor and the good characterization that makes it go down more easily?
Second issue is the sheer amount of info dumping that goes on… granted I am in the opening stage and we need to introduce the principals, but good god there must be a more elegant way to do it.

Chapter 6 of Glory is basically a redux of my favorite chapter of Speak Memory, the train chapter, where Nab gives one of the best descriptions of riding in a train ever. Omg I love that train, the Nord Express! I’ve ridden it so many times in my mind. Also in Glory he offers some details about a stop in Berlin that is surely autobiographical. Omitted in SM because of bad German associations?