Vladimir Nabokov

Aight, this one bait I'm not taking

To be fair jane austen is shit

>Ignoring that Nabokov wrote one of the best essays on reading literature ever made.
Even if his prose wasn't great, "Good Readers and Good Writers" alone would make him a legend. en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.html

you can think women are intellectually inferior and hilarious as objects of genius and yet humor them occassionally just like you can with fags and blacks

I'm not baiting. People like too many things. Most writers just aren't good. Better to live with and ruminate on the precious few.

Then pray tell, who do you like at least as much as Nabokov?

In English, I think Melville, Hawthorne, Salinger, Hemingway, and Twain are worth my time. Some of Tao Lin's early work is alright relative to what we have so far this century. I don't care for that Taipei and I suspect he is done pleasing me for good. Alice Munro is alright in moderation I guess but I consider her about one step above television.

Outside of English, Tolstoy, Chekhov, the old testament.

Haha Piggokov haha

milquetoast: the post

Hardly.

Women:
>Relationships between characters are well thought out. Novel always ends up being about love.
Men:
>Philosophical insight lies beyond the individual for individuals are disposable. Just like how all men are disposable.

milquepost

>Salinger, Hemingway, and Twain

oh okay you are trolling after all

I don't know why you would feel that way. Those men's books never run out of things to say.

I know you're not dissing Twain. He's what made American begin to be better than the English.

I could live in a closet with nothing but the collected works of Twain and I'd be leading a happy life.

He's a racist.

He's a racist that actively tried to eradicate racism.

You're a fool.

Shit taste aside from Melville tbqh

Nope.

Pedophiles hate roasties.

News at eleven.

You probably like some third-rate charlatan like Faulkner.

ppl who live easy lives writing about easy lives,
ppl who suffer write about suffering.
wew almost surprising

what

Nabokov achieved absolutely nothing in his writing. It's fun and beautiful, but that's it.

This litterally isn't true. He loved Don Quixote and taught it to his students. The quote of him calling it a crule cold book or something is him commenting on all the physical and psychological torment that Don Quixote goes through

GREAT TASTE to be honest. Melville and Hawthorne are a given, as are Tolstoy, Chekhov, the Bible (come on now, the New Testament is inspired too). Salinger gets shit on a lot by Veeky Forums a lot because Catcher is one of the most beloved books of all time and they want to be contrarian. Hemingway is one of the greats; another thing Veeky Forums gets wrong; Veeky Forums's hero Joyce himself said that A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is one of the greatest short stories of all time. Twain is excellent; Veeky Forums ought to read "The Mysterious Stranger" or "The Facts Concerning The Recent Carnival etc." Haven't looked into Tao Lin much at all, thought he was just a meme, what I've read of him (stuff from Taipei) seemed pretty awful but who knows. I dunno, I love Kafka though, so screw you anyways. And Joyce's Dubliners is not to be overlooked.

>Salinger
M8...

Thanks for your thoughtful message. I just saw this. Don't know if you'll see this but regarding Tao Lin, I would look into his novel "Richard Yates", my favorite of his. In fact, I sometimes think of it in Nabakovian terms. I don't know if he'd like it of course. But he had this criticism for writers like Sartre and Barbusse, calling their prose "A tense-looking but really very loose type of writing." But the way Tao Lin brings minimalism to it's logical conclusion is a finely crafted affair and I think he'd appreciate it as a rare example of tense but controlled writing. That and the ironic self-mythologizing makes me think Nabokov might get a kick out of it even though Tao once said Nabokov would probably find him retarded.

As for Salinger, he's the writer that got me into serious lit and Catcher never runs out of things to say to me.

I personally don't think you're a serious reader if you can't appreciate Vlad.

go ahead and bump this

Have you even read any of them? A single sentence of Proust's couldn't fit on a Hallmark card. And, anyway, his writing's not nearly saccharine enough for Hallmark. As beautiful as In Search of Lost Time is, it's quite a pessimistic work.

Why is Veeky Forums treating this like an actual Nabokov quote? He knew how to punctuate and was actually a fan of Jane Austen's work.

I've read them all many times.

Hallmark card writer, yes

>Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Or should I say fortune cookie writer:

>We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Though I will say this in his favor, the above quote is actually a good explanation for why he's a worthless writer. Mediocre minds are drawn to stuff like Proust, 'Wisdom Literature' because they can't find answers for themselves. Going to literature for instruction? You find it by living and thinking.

Amen.

Don't forget Chesterton

He's a great children's author, one of the top ten really. And not low on the list either.

i wanna cum all over your face in a hostile way

You just Googled Proust quotes and naturally stumbled upon ones of that nature, as they're the kind that appeal most to normies. If you thought Proust was shit you wouldn't have read In Search of Lost Time many times, and if you really had read it many times you'd know those particular quotes are in no way characteristic of his opus. My guess is that you haven't read a single work by any of the authors you criticized.

I've read it multiple times in the original French. I googled it to refresh my memory. I'm not one of those people that can memorize passages. The reason I've read it multiple times is because one read is not sufficient for a book. A lesson I internalized from Nabokov incidentally.

He is right that women writers were mediocre at best. That's not to say women are worse then men, it's just more evidence that they were never really given the chance to excel at writing. Men were always encouraged to succeed and women encouraged to just be a good wife, naturally only a few female writers would come out of that and those who did were.

>mfw this pisses off sjws and pol

I can appreciate him. A handful of short stories and Pale Fire are quite good, but he should never be compared to the greats. And anyone who dismisses both Dostoevsky and Faulkner in the same breath shouldn't be taken seriously anyway.

Who are you fooling you utter pseud

Don't forget Mann, Zweig, Beckett, Mishima, Kobo Abe, Osamu Dazai

Kafka is no where close to Nabby, the rest are very good writers but Kafka is at least one if not two tiers behind Nabokov.

Lmao
One of them is part of the canon, the other barely dragged himself up by nothing but edgy comments about the greatest figures in the canon and one supremely edgy book

So all women everywhere throughout history, have been the victims of one giant interconnected conspiracy to keep them raising children instead of going off and becoming great writers? Christ almighty, do you ever consider the possibility that they are simply biologically more adapted to the role of the carer? And there's nothing inherently wrong with this either, raising families is an essential, dignified job.

Nabokov is god tier. Bottom line. End of discussion.

>I define the bottom line
Kys faggot. You're little Russian boy really makes me think Bloom is onto something with his whole "Anxiety of Influence" thing. Any charlatan with a lexicon and an eye for structure can recreate any one of his silly little works, none of which really amount to much compared with the masters he so desperately tries to emulate. He wears his Europeanism like a badge, but one must wonder why he was never taken seriously EXCEPT in America.

You realise he's riffing on Nabokov's own concise dismissals of other authors, right?

>pseud

Uh, Austen was one of the small group of writers Nabokov approved of.

>A single sentence of Proust's couldn't fit on a Hallmark card.

Lmao imagine writing this as if it means anything

This thread is hilarious, I need to come up with more fake quotes from famous authors

>He wears his Europeanism like a badge, but one must wonder why he was never taken seriously EXCEPT in America.

What an embarrassing sentence

Too bad he read it in English.

He probably read it in French, no?

>'Woman aren't even human, their only worth lies in vagina.'
What did he mean by this?

>You realise he's riffing on Nabokov's own concise dismissals of other authors, right?

To be fair, that's like half the posts on Veeky Forums in general

Yeah I'll check out the Tao book. Out of curiosity, how many languages do you know?

It's obvious that even Nabokov worships Kafka, just read his lectures on him and The Metamorphosis

Is this a troll? Tao is worse than Rupi Kaur.

Its obviously Tao same fagging

He was pretty complimentary to Austen's Mansfield Park. Considering his numerous critical blindspots, I wouldn't take this one too seriously.

He disliked Finnegans Wake, so he is a retard in my book.

Oh yeah, whats your favorite part of Finnegans Wake?

>not farts

ITT: People who are going to be really upset when they get a load of this guy.

SHIT TASTE

>"innovation" matters more than impeccable technique
f off

>counting only prose writers
>Pessoa
>prose

FODA-SE PARA A PUTA QUE VOS PARIU, I FUCKING HATE THIS BOARD! GO KILL YOURSELF, YOU FUCKING SCUM

I think its worth reminding everyone here that Jane Austen is talentless and there’ve been better excerpts in critique threads and pastas posted on other boards than most of her highest octane works. If you even for a second think he wasn’t correct you’re unbelievably pussy whipped and browbeaten by the other sex or just an insecure woman. Take a passage from Pale Fire, now compare to Pride and Prejudice. its hilarious, do this for any great male author and ostensibly talented female author. Every single time you should be in tears. Note that the themes of women’s novels have to center around women’s issues. They can never touch the numinous or the existential or the raw fabric of human consciousness. totally narcissistic and dependent on their own image to feel.

Even in this thread Nabokov's evil influence on literature can still be felt. As far as his criticism goes, he's a leech, a bloodsucker, not fighting on honourable grounds, like a critic should, but rather latching onto his opponent and sucking them dry, the lost life going nowhere (certainly not into his books). He's a stylist and nothing else. A heartless man who hated Dostoyevsky and Mann and who couldn't stop himself from exploiting America's insecurity about its own sexuality and ultimately also about its "own" langauge.
That being said, he was clearly a genius and a great writer, just not a great human being.

I'm also partial to his poetry but Livro do Desassossego is still better than everything that I've read by Nabokov..

To be fair, it seems like Pessoa's poetry didn't translate as well as his prose

>mfw George Eliot wrote the perfect novel

He literally wrote most of his poetry in English!

Kek, I wasn't aware of that. Always thought there was something I wasn't quite getting at, lost in translation.

who are your preferred poets? not trying to bait or argue, just hoping to help you get an angle on Pessoa.

I'm not very knowledgeable on poetry, but I like german modernist/expressionist poets the most, Rilke and George for example. But I also like Goethe, Rimbaud, and William Blake

Well shit, I like Rilke and WB better myself

I know four languages for now.

What are they?

English, Latin, French, Russian.

>So all women everywhere throughout history, have been the victims of one giant interconnected conspiracy to keep them raising children instead of going off and becoming great writers?
Yes, don't you? It's not even a conspiracy though, it's not an universal conscious plan, it's something that cannot NOT be happening in every day life. You are not expected to go another way, so no one talks to you as if you were, there are no opportunities open at any time, you are discredited if you try because no one has done it before to the people you'd know, you'd face opposition from family and friends, people will jump all over you advising you to go back, to marry some guy you don't even know etc. The very thought that women are inferior is what makes them inferior, because this thought is all pervading. It has only given in a bit more today because capitalism doesn't care who you are, as long as you work and pay.

Shit taste

Your gay

Just like your taste

Its amazing how I would have found you respectable if you weren't a fan of Tao Meme, its funny how someone can emulate the appearance of taste without actually having any