This book is a distasteful high concept gag and the characters are all cartoonishly ludicrous

This book is a distasteful high concept gag and the characters are all cartoonishly ludicrous.
Can't believe this was recommended to me as some sort of masterwork

100% agree.

Most of the time reading Nabokov is like reading a more ambitious Borges. They are cleaver but their literature is empty. There's nothing of insight in it. It puts a smile on your face and makes you think how clever it is, but that's it.

>recommended to me as
why would you trust lit recommendations?
I recommend this and DFW all the time as a cruel joke

Yeah but it was in Blade Runner 49 too.
I have no idea why, it had absolutely nothing to do with the movie thematically

really? hahaha
lets just slip this in for those in the know ;D i'm so enlightened

Is Ada or Ardor a meme too?

Felt pretty much the same.

Nabokov is a delight to read, but what began as a hilarious, self-important misinterpretation of a rather dull poem, quickly lost steam. Nabokov's prose and the relative shortness of the book kept me going.

It was an enjoyable read, but I have no idea what Nabokov was trying to achieve.

This one is not memed as much anymore, but yes it is. You should only read Lolita, if any.

No compassion for John Shade and his daughter's suicide?

Are most of Nabokov's novels like this?
I read Lolita and felt like it had a lot of heart.

Couldn't have gave less of a shit about John Shade, he seemed like a boring billowing idiot and not in any endearing way

This is a good description for about half his novels. I think there’s a lot more humanity in Nabokov than Borges, but t manifests in a less personal and obvious way than, e.g. Hemingway. Hemingway’s life experiences with the war and fishing and sexual frustration/compensation/overindulgence bleed into his novels rather obviously, but Nabokov involves his personal tragedy of losing his home country to far left radicals, and losing his patriotic and honorable father to far right assassins, and then witnessing The horrors of a far right Germany, then coming to America completely estranged from Europe and watching his adopted country face off against his now far left homeland.

The man writes characters who are eternally transient like Nabokov was, and I think the best ending line of the book (Pale Fire) is the final entry in the appendix: “Zembla, a distant northern land.” Something is memorable, and using New York time bestseller buzzwords, haunting, imo about this choice for an ending. It’s a cold, wistful ending to a puzzling and calculating comic book like book about assassins and foreign espionage and expatriotism.

I think emotionally it’s a novel that tried to impart the sort of expatriot angst that Cornfather felt in the United States, though Nabokov could never really be blunt and tritely melodramatic for enough pages to make it obvious to the reader. I think he was just too manly to express his emotions behind anything less than a puzzle in his fiction, which is his one major fault as a writer. That said, Pale Fire is still a much more personal and human work than any of Borges’ stories, and it’s still one of Nabokov’s least emotional works from a glance. In my opinion it’s a very emotional work given Nabokov’s life and the parallels it has to his experiences, and there’s far less to puzzle away at to get what he was trying for artistically, though of course he left a labyrinth of stylistic innovation that postmodern authors expanded upon after. But those are less impressive after postmodern styles have become as played out and overdone and boring as they have.

Change of subject. How often do you guys think Nabokov choked his chicken a week? He only had one kid and probably didn’t use condoms on Vera so he probably had to squeeze at least some of that testosterone into an old sock, right? No way someone cums in a petite Russian woman for 50 years and has only one kid.

>probably didn’t use condoms on Vera
Why wouldn't he?

CELLS

EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE TO HAVE THEIR AGE IN THE NAME FIELD FOR EVERY POST TRUTHFULLY

>Waaaaaah young people

If you're using this forum over the age of 25 then you have no right to complain

He was an old timer Russian who probably couldn’t find condoms in a marketplace until he came to the United States, probably by around the 50s. I mean, old timers never really used rubbers since it wasn’t really part of the culture back then. It was more like timing periods and pulling out. But even then you’d have multiple kids over time with those methods since a man as manly as Nabokov probably had an irresistible urge to flood his wife’s cunt. He probably had a pretty strong libido given his sex scenes in Ada and how they’re written. And he was in his 60s then! Imagine how often he was cranking out quarts in his 60, then triple that to see how many he got when he first married Vera. That poor woman probably had to have the plumber’s number written next to the bed stand. The man was probably a beast who drained his shaggy aristocratic balls at least twice a morning and thrice an evening. There’s no way Vera could quaff all that cum in any of her holes, she’d need a cum pump at the hospital if she swallowed, a bucket the size of a swimming pool if she spat, a bottle of laxitives the volume of an industrial tank if she took it solely up the ass (I’m sure nabby was a Joycean), so that leaves the option of raw dog vaginal action. Given that he filled each other hole before getting balls deep in gash, he probably had three pint sized evening cums left. That’s every day. Assuming he stopped 6 days before ovulation, and started again a day after, that’s a week of no vaginal fun. There’s no way he pulled out, he was a man of commitment, which is why he was wrote in Russian for years after exile. No, he probably drained the main vein onto a cum rag of some sort, and probably had to do it 3 times a day for a week of every month. That works out to 21 pints of seed a month, or 252 pints a year.

That’s almost 32 gallons of cum a year.

Its possible she wasn't particularly fertile herself

t. 17 yo
my age is eternally infinity

MODS

Let’s assume he never pulled out, and he slipped in 3 pints of man juice an evening after teaching Russian novels to sophomore college students. No exceptions. That’s 32 gallons of cum a year during fertile periods. Assuming a non literary mortal who reads and enjoys Dostoevsky cums about 10mL a cum, that’s .0211 pints. Nabokov was cumming 47.39 times the average pleb amount per orgasm! Since the average plebeian cums probably twice a day, and gets less pussy than a true patrician, let’s say that the pleb cums on average once a week in a pussy. That means he has only an average of a 16% if knocking up his wife and it’s only one chance a month. Since he’s probably less manly than Nabokov let’s put that number at 5%. Nabokov’s cum probably pearly white with spermatozoa, so let’s put his average chance at 50% per fertile day. Since he did it all 7 days, that’s 1-(.5)^7 which is 1/128 chance of NOT knocking up Vera a month. Meaning he was over 99% a month. Let’s round up to 100 because he had good prose. That means that he married Vera from 25 to 45 until she had menopause, so he could have had as many as 20*12/9 kids, so about 26 kids. That means Vera was 1/26th the fertility level of an average woman. But since Nabokov had such strong skill with rhetoric, he could have easily persuaded his wife’s ovaries to produce more eggs with a nice Russian poem about flowers or some shit. So assuming that gets her up to half fertility, that means 13 kids. He only had 1.

I would hate to be the one washing his socks.

>I would hate to be the one washing his socks.
he didnt wash them, right after he utilized them he would put them back on his feet (half the spurts in one, half the spurts in the other) and pace in his garden, the sperm (being mini nabokovs, of a pure and transcendent state, existing closest to the realm of forms) getting its opportunity to experience the outer world if only for the smallest time, being very sensitive and impressed upon by the lights and sounds and smells, of the garden, and then the squishing of their father, to geld back into his feet, and work their way back up his body, invigorating all his cells along the way, passing on their co constructed theory and relations of their experiences in the void, and that relationship compared to their bursting forth into the profane world, mixing and theorizing, making their way finally up to Nabokovs head, in which they would whisper into his inner ear, the ideas for his next book.

...

This is so incredibly false that I'm sure you haven't read fuck all by him except pic related and Lolita.

Saying most of his work is like that is a bit excessive, but Nabokov loved his gimmicks. Are you going to pretend that in stuff like Despair or Ada there's much more than good prose and cleverness?

on user, the literature reflects a large partly what is inside the reader: that user saw got nothing from the book, saw only emptyness in it, because they only brought emptyness to it

Sounds about right to me.

except Lolita can't be characterized as empty either

I literally have no idea what you're talking about. Despair is one of the most humane and touching books I've ever read.

This. There are not bad books just bad readers.

Wtf I love ready player one now!

Now you’re a good reader

the protagonist recites lines of the poem for the baseline test ('cells within cells interlinked')
I am currently reading it and am on the brink of putting it down because I just don't want to read about zembla anymore...

I fucking hate Zembla, even the name is stupid.
If Nabokov made Kimbot a Russian aristocrat the novel would have been far more engaging

you just don't get it :^)