When I grow up, I want to be like Vladimir Nabokov, whose early life was a sweep of my dreams of Europe, born to a Russian upperclass family in St. Petersburg, moving to Crimea and then Ukraine and then lock, stock, and barrel to the UK, where Vladimir took up Zoology at Cambridge, and later to Berlin, which dear old Vlad hated, and then to Prague, only to be chased across the Atlantic to New York by the horrors of Hitler.
I am desperately seeking something that could ignite a new flame in my obsession-starved heart, as did the Molotov-err-Nabokov novel Lolita, both beatified and ballyhooed in its time, venerated and vilified, but ultimately, if resentfully, given its rightful place in America’s finest works. (Sorry to associate Nabokov with a crude bomb, defined by Merriam-Webster as made of a bottle filled with a flammable liquid (such as gasoline) and usually fitted with a wick (such as a saturated rag) that is ignited just before the bottle is hurled. I guess all I wish to say is that Nabokov was the bomb, first-rate, more like the Soviet-invented thermonuclear aerial bomb AN602 from Russia, the Tsar Bomba, arguably “the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested,” but Molotov is fine for Nabokov—it rhymes with his name.
I read Lolita first in my teens, my adolescent hormones naturally leading my attention to the trees of pornographic details I guess I deduced from the text more than I found in it that I missed the forest of literary tricks with which he crafted this masterpiece.
On page 177 of my annotated copy, I was laughing like a maniac over Humbert Humbert’s audience with the mistress of an all-girls school he chose for his little Lo, “light of his life, fire of his loins.”
How, in trying to impress him with her progressive approach to educating the girls, “That is, with due respect to Shakespeare and the others, we want our girls to communicate freely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty old books,” the schoolmistress bobbled and butchered her own self-aggrandizing spiel by calling her client all sorts of different names—Mr. Humbird, Dr. Humburg, Dr. Hummer, Hummerson...
To think only a few pages before, a passage I was reading rather distractedly because it was a long paragraph full of numbers, explaining in dollars and cents how Humbert’s income was cracking under the strain of his joy ride with his nymphet Lolita across America’s beaches, deserts, cheap motels, and middle-of-nowhere pitstops, cracked open my tear ducts instead and with nothing more powerful than a parenthetic modifier enclosed in em-dashes, my favorite of punctuations but only when used to this dramatic, surprising effect.
Here is the sentence.
“And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.”
What beauty!
I only have to thank my book club, The Very Extra Book Club, composed of Belle Daza, Pauline Juan, Rajo Laurel, Rocio Olbes, Marielle Santos-Po, Farah Sy, Stephanie Zubiri, and especially Jae De Veyra Pickrell, who picked this book, along with Junichiro Tanizaki’s Naomi, for the golden opportunity to reread this classic in 2019, rediscovering in this second reading the very jewel at its core, Nabokov’s Molotov writing.
Now I think Nabokov is among the foremost of my dead literary heroes, right up there with Marcel Proust whose masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past (changed in recent years into In Search of Lost Time), higher on my list the JD Salinger, whose Catcher in the Rye I must have read more times than my fingers could count. Among my living favorites, on the other hand, are Jeffrey Eugenides, Orhan Pamuk, and Salman Rushdie.
I am so blessed to have been obsessed with reading, but I’m afraid I am in a reading slump at the moment. There’s hope: On my bedside sits a copy of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I need to start reading soon for my next book club dinner. I am blessed too with The Very Extra Book Club. It’s always around to feed or reignite my joy in reading.