Subject
Re: VN's worst novel? (fwd)
Date
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From: Robert Daeley <rdaeley@empirenet.com>
>I have always loved *Mary* which is brilliant because of its limitations
>and its wonderful joke. It prefigures *Despair* in that way, and is
>literary without being altogether airless.
I'm not denying _Mary_'s brilliance, a reflection of VVN's own, but it is
nevertheless flawed, an admission which (albeit semi-reluctantly) he
makes himself in its Forward.
> My least favorite novel is ADA, which is in large passages silly,
>self-indulgent, and . . . smug. To many tri-lingual puns for my taste.
>Too much showing off. Of course, I don't like Finnegans Wake, either.
> But then, I'm only in my early sixties. Maybe in twenty years . . .
What was it Nora Joyce (JJ's wife) said? "Why don't you write something
people can understand?" Truth to oneself as a writer or one's vision of
a particular novel on occasion precludes making it generally accessible.
But even if this is so, VVN was multilingual and terribly fond of making
the reader play the writer in a sort of literary game. Showing off?
Perhaps, but only in the same sense as Kasparov might show off against
thirty challengers in simultaneous chess.
--
Robert Daeley * rdaeley@empirenet.com
Luzhin Defence Centre
<http://www.empirenet.com/~rdaeley/>
"Save a Life: Kill Your Television."
>I have always loved *Mary* which is brilliant because of its limitations
>and its wonderful joke. It prefigures *Despair* in that way, and is
>literary without being altogether airless.
I'm not denying _Mary_'s brilliance, a reflection of VVN's own, but it is
nevertheless flawed, an admission which (albeit semi-reluctantly) he
makes himself in its Forward.
> My least favorite novel is ADA, which is in large passages silly,
>self-indulgent, and . . . smug. To many tri-lingual puns for my taste.
>Too much showing off. Of course, I don't like Finnegans Wake, either.
> But then, I'm only in my early sixties. Maybe in twenty years . . .
What was it Nora Joyce (JJ's wife) said? "Why don't you write something
people can understand?" Truth to oneself as a writer or one's vision of
a particular novel on occasion precludes making it generally accessible.
But even if this is so, VVN was multilingual and terribly fond of making
the reader play the writer in a sort of literary game. Showing off?
Perhaps, but only in the same sense as Kasparov might show off against
thirty challengers in simultaneous chess.
--
Robert Daeley * rdaeley@empirenet.com
Luzhin Defence Centre
<http://www.empirenet.com/~rdaeley/>
"Save a Life: Kill Your Television."