Go on, fill it in Veeky Forums

go on, fill it in Veeky Forums

fixed that for you familia

Nabokov's stories are very well-crafted, and he portrays his characters with great subtlety and detail. What he lacks is emotion, but that's not what your graph is measuring.

wtf
how did you do that

really makes you think eh

I've only read Lolita, but Humbert is frighteningly emotive at times.

"Lolita. Lolita. Lolita. Lolita. Lolita. Lolita. Lolita. Repeat until the page is full, printer" was a powerful way to show how maniacally in love Humbert was and if that's not emotion then I don't know what is.

Remove the x-axis

Do you mean sentimental moments?

Lolita has them, they are just very few. Remember when we get our first probable crack in the narrative that Humbert is telling the truth about what is going on? He states constantly that Lolita is happy and then one night in the back of the car Lolita seemingly from out of no where cries for her mother until she falls asleep and Humbert says nothing.

op is seriously retarded

>Nabokov couldn't write characters! His work has no thematic substance!

I'm tired of this meme.

Nabokov is a strange case - I don't think he's a complete sociopath, but he's very close to being one. Think about the sequence in Pale Fire where the king can only care about his wife in vivid dreams; perhaps the author himself only experienced emotion in the abstract.

How, if at all, is this connected to his fascination with hebephilia? I'm not sure, but he's certainly an interesting individual.

As abusive and corrupt as the relationship in Lolita is, it's deeply, painfully passionate. When people say it's emotionless or deign to approach calling it sociopathic, I feel like I've read an entirely different book.

It's true Humbert's relations with Charlotte, Rita and Valeria are cold and lifeless as possibly can be, but it's obvious he's not incapable of experiencing emotions when he's such a jumbled salivating mess around Lolita.

Like I said though, I've only read Lolita. I'll get around to Pale Fire some time.

I've only read Lolita, but the story just seems too polished. It's so well-written and so slick it's unnatural, like what a well programmed computer would write

Conversely, I've only read PF, so I can't speak on Lolita - really, I'm basing this more on what he's said in his autobiography, in criticism, in interviews, etc. For example, in the afterword to Lolita he says it was meant to be purely aesthetic. Maybe he just wants to keep emotion out of his art, I don't know.

Pale Fire's narrator is intensely obsessed and delusional too, so maybe he just finds that to be the most evocative mode in which to write.

What I find interesting, though, is how much of himself he puts into the narrator, considering how he starts out as basically a joke. So I guess Nabokov's ability to laugh at himself makes him a bit more likable to me. From looking at synopses of his other works, it seems as if most of them are filled with hints of distorted autobiography.

Exactly, it's a sort of uncanny valley effect.

you could might have chosen a book that doesn't have exceptionally well-crafted characters and a compelling plot. it still would have been a stupid observation, but at least you wouldn't have been flat-out wrong.

>character development

What a blind-ass trope.

I think he more specifically says he writes for the purpose of aesthetic pleasure and thinks the "social good or the Literature of Ideas aspirations of certain fictional works from authors like Mann or if he were alive in his day, DFW, are fake.

Lolita is soaked in emotion, it's just packaged in the literary equivalent of (total coincidence he adapted Lolita) someone like Kubrick. Slick, sober, professional, and in full control of where the story carries the reader. Those things don't sum up to "emotionless" for me especially since it inherently requires no small measure of artistic sensitivity to accomplish something like Lolita.

But the lack of spontaneity makes it feel so manipulative

I came into it blind, which is the best way to approach any work of fiction, and Charlotte getting hit by that car was pretty spontaneous. As was Clare Quilty's appearance, I suspected the Red Aztec driver was a private detective. These two elements among many other surprising lines and musings. The originality and shock of the work is being grossly understated.

You just don't go into Hawkes, especially that book, expecting anything resembling a conventional story or even the bare elements of one.

GoT doesn't really have good character development, though.

I don't mean unpredictable plot-wise. I mean some moment where the author pours his soul into the work. Nabokov is always in control, cooly detached.

I think we can look to Kant to put this into words: Nabokov gives us beauty, but he never gives us the sublime.

What's something like GoT in terms of intriguing storylines and character development but with better prose? and hopefully not sci-fi/fantasy. Essentially, what do anons think comes the closest to the left upper corner of the graph?

Here you go famalam

Someone just put Moby Dick at the top right with Ulysses already

Where would War and Peace go?

I'm gonna get flak for this, because I'm not entirely right, but I think Ulysses specifically Bloom, fits into here perfectly. Although Dedalus is a great character he isn't really developed much in the book, more so in the space between the two(the other being Portrait of course) which is in and of itself amazing and unique character development, but as that isn't what I'm exactly talking about, ignore it, and pretend I never said anything in the first place: Bloom is a character who does not develop much, at least not in a way the reader can easily see in any kind of effective or affective way.

Just cuz Nabokov's not histrionic doesn't mean he's not emotional.

Aesthetic doesn't mean unemotional, it could actually very emotional and is certainly not heavy on the brain. It just means it's not a lesson to be taught, he's not trying yo educate you or convince you of his believes. It's not a parable, A Bildungsroman, a comment on anything.

To be fair, while Lolita did emotionally devastate me when I was younger, stuff like Ada and PF are incredibly 'cold.' They're about as emotional as Naked Lunch.

So sad that it's true. Not completely, but it's a significant problem.
You read Lolita and you walk away with very little, outside the impressive aesthetic.