In a message dated 08/03/2005 20:27:16 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu (i.e. Andrew Brown) writes:

Huck Finn may well be a difficult book for non-American readers to cope with

"Huckleberry Finn" is surely a morally complex work. It seems fatuously anachronistic to object to it because it accurately reproduces the word "nigger". Also, there is surely an ironic distancing between author and narrator in relation to many of the less than socially approved activities of the latter and his friend Tom Sawyer. But my friend Thomas Szasz has told me how moved he was as a boy reading the book in Budapest in Hungarian translation, and again as a man in the United States in English, by its showing how an "ignorant child" can see through the evil of slavery when none of the adults around him can.

The occasion when Huck Finn risks, as he supposes, going to hell for not turning his friend, the escaped slave Jim, in to the authorities is one of the great existential moments in literature.

If the Nabokovs disapproved of the book for DN, it would seem that they were underestimating his sensibility.

Anthony Stadlen