Romanian author/Nabokov fan

Hi, I just joined this group. I'm a Romanian-born author and literary/art critic. Like many of you, I love Nabokov's fiction. Two of my favorite novels are Lolita and Ada, so I'm glad to see that there's a fan group on librarything on Nabokov's fiction.

Hi Claudia,

On behalf of everyone I'd like to welcome you to the group. Perhaps your arrival will spark interest among the other members here. Regarding my predilections and reading vagaries, I'm fairly close to having read everything by V. Sirin. The most recent, Pale Fire, went down so quick and smooth sandwiched between Thackeray's Book of Snobs and Olympe de Clèves, which I'm presently just a few hundred pages from finishing. One of the greatest thrills I have is deciding what to read next, looking through my shelves.

Ada was a pretty amazing trip with lots of baroque detail and Nabokovian beauty. Brian Boyd's book was a nice follow-up. It made much more sense and sort of magnified my appreciation once I read that it took place on a different planet or alternate reality and wasn't just a sustained word play or riffing on things in our realm. I noticed some of this too in the narrative description of Zembla by Charles Kinbote. An almost science-fiction type fairy tale telling without the aliens and spaceships. Really one-of-a-kind stuff. I'd say it's even just a little bit different than the created worlds of Bend Sinister and Look at the Harlequins.

I recently picked up copies of Mary and Look at the Harlequins! I haven't read either, but there's a nice symmetry between Early Nabokov and Late Nabokov. Like David Foster Wallace and James Joyce, he's a consummate stylist, archly opinionated, and never won The Big One -- The Nobel Prize for Literature.