Ok, we’ll, I haven’t finished this completely but the only way to make notes here is to mark it as read.

“The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales - and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.”

My favorite quote from Nabokov is “Curiously enough one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” I am beginning to better understand this in relation to literature (as opposed to fiction).

So I’d started this book 4 years ago when I read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. (I think I bought Nabokov’s lectures nearly forty years ago with plans to read it leisurely when I had time…which took until I retired). Nabokov’s analysis impressed me when it dug into the physical layout of the house and diagramed it.

Then last year I finally read Joyce’s Ulysses. And loved Nabokov’s lecture on it. And I agree with him as to the man in the brown Macintosh.

I need to reread his essays on both these works.

And now I’ve just finished Austen’s Mansfield Park. Again, Nabokov diagrams the physical space, the geography. I find that a curious but interesting/ refreshing approach. I like how he examines Austen’s social critiques (the dimpled sentence; the epigrammatic intonation). I like how he examines the speech patterns of characters and what it reveals about them. And he notes that Austen doesn’t spend much on describing scenery but rather reveals through dialogue. Though he notes in the description of the Price house, Fanny’s childhood house, how it would have been described as Dickensian if Dickens had written before Austen. I like how he perceives the book as being a play itself, not just a novel. And I like how he picks up on Austen’s use of what we would call today Fanny’s stream of consciousness.

So on to read Dickens, Flaubert and Proust. And the Russian writers for Nabokov’s other volume ( )

If you ever wanted to know what a scholar who can write with depth and immediacy about masterpieces has to say, this is the one. Sip or gulp, this book can be read in minute segments or holus bolus and much can be gained. Worth it. ( )

At first I was wary of this book, being a former grad student and current exile from the literary academy with no interest in rejoining those stale debates. But what a breath of fresh air it proved to be. Nabokov was, not surprisingly, a keen reader, and he brings all his technical prowess to bear on works from Dickens, Austen, Flaubert, and others. He has the gift of entering a work on its own terms and bringing it to life, not deadening it with some inane theory. I read these lectures alongside the books they describe, and I found them delightfully illuminating. ( )

Me dio ganas de releer una serie de obras de las que incluye, impresionante la capacidad y el conocimiento de Nabokov. ( )

A good book that makes a case for his author rather than ideological literary thesis. ( )