Thank you, Jansy for the detailed coments on my
pastiche.
You are right about Lisa. She is more a haughty
cold Queen of the North than a finicky princess:
'She always felt hot and buoyant
no matter the cold...' Pnin, pg 44 (Penguin 1997)
This idea of a haughty
coldness bears out with her continuous attempt to 'castrate' Pnin from the
moment she married him on the rebound, then forcing him to pay an allowance
to Victor, to criticising his friends, his home and even the colour of his
suit.
The sadness or rather the beauty
of this relationship is that Pnin recognises her for what she is,
recognises that he is unable to do anything about his feelings about her here on
this earth and yet wonders:
'If people are reunited in
heaven (...) then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, over me, that
shrivelled, helpless, lame thing, her soul?'
Pnin, pg48
Steve,
Yes, I took the approximation to David Foster
Wallace with a big pinch of salt after being overwhelmed with gratitude
initially that it was not compared to Dan Brown. Then I spent an hour
submitting various pieces of my own work. I submitted maybe five different
portions from one chapter and I got a range of writers from Stephen King, Joyce
and Hemingway. Then I submitted from another chapter and it was
biased intially to Orwell and then heavily towards Stephen King. It
was an interesting exercise in the sense I could see where my writing was
loose and where it tended to become tighter.
I totally agree with your statement:
"Be yourself, without trying to imitate
anyone."
Most writers
are egoistic enough to want to see what comes out. I know I am
interested in seeing what lurks within me. But I believe new writers (like young
artists who copy great draughtsmen like Da Vinci or Raphael) can open
their eyes to new ways of seeing and understanding by looking closely at a
master.
Thank you both,
Geeta
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2010 6:27
PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Fw: something for the
N-list?
Carolyn Kunin sent an
illustration for the List, related to bubbling glasses and blue (not green)
mermaids. They seem to thrive with acid lemons!
Like the blinis, with thin
slices of lemon and sour cream that, in Pnin's pastiche, were lovingly
prepared for his ex-wife in Geeta Roopnarine's pastiche of "Pnin." (Cf.
" I am an MA Creative Writing student who follow your discussions closely.
The mention of 'writealikes' perked my interest as I had written a pastiche on
Nabokov's Pnin ... the relationship of Lisa (whom I call Lara) to Pnin.
Instead of having her compose horrible poetry, I gave her an awful voice and
instead of asking for money for Victor (Claude), I had her ask for one of
Pnin's kidneys instead.It would be nice to get some feedback on the pastiche
and how closely it approximates Nabokov's
writing.]
JM: (On Roopnarine's Pastiche of
"Pnin"): I loved the details about perfect blinis linked to "princess with the
pea." Lara's demand that "Pnin" should
give away not his ova (like
the popping round eggs of caviar he intended for her) but donate his kidney (
a new rage, postmodern project!) is fun. His
shying away from a cascade of
scrambled words emerging from an open-ended funnel is great. The alternation
between Pnin's love's submissiveness and
satirical objectivity is apt and
so is the sentence: "...she left, dragging the light with her," as are the
last lines related to it: "leaving him in the remembrance of the cold darkness
of her heart-shaped mouth.// Well, I always said he looked moth-like
with those two tuffs of hair sprouting behind his ears. And she, an inverted
comet, pulling him in her wake." The only non-Nabokov item, as I see it
from my foreign standpoint, is the predominant use of
dialogue.
The reference to the oversensitive princess (a pea hidden below
a pile of duvets) comes from a H.C.Andersen's story. It led me to
Michael Maar's "Speak,Nabokov", when he details the presence of Andersen's
"Little Mermaid" in the work of Nabokov. (I felt cheated by not finding her in
Copenhagen but I was told that she'd been carried away, perhaps with
stone and a few grains of salt, to an exhibit in Japan). Maar stresses the
theme of homosexual love and androgyny.*Geeta, in her pastiche, hinted at
Andersen/Nabokov's "cold queens," besides the rendering of a
finicky Pnin-allergic Lara...
............................................................................................................................
* Cf.M.Maar "Speak, Nabokov", sub-chapter "Mermaids and Hetaerae" where he wrote: "the most brutal
wars are civil and fratricidal ones. Along with Freud and Doestoyevsky, Mann
occupies a few posts in the borderland that Nabokov claims for himself
alone.// An important arena in this disputed territory is the fairy
tale...Nabokov, too, was under the spell of the Danish writer...And the Snow
Queen appears in it in various guises. The famous beginning of the fairy tale
even plays a hidden key role in his novel Pnin."(18-19)
"Hans Andersen had been - take note! - a
stained-glass artist in Lübeck before losing his mind and believing himself to
be a cathedral. The man from Lübeck...fuses with the fairy-tale Dane into one
person....Literature can be a great ballroom resounding with echoes...no more
an accident that Humbert gives his nymphet a deluxe volume of Andersen's
The Little Mermaid...His late novel Ada is a thinly veiled retelling of the
sad fairy tale." (19-20)
"How closely Nabokov cleaves to his model in
Ada becomes apparent when the novel is superimposed over the Andersen tale...
Van and Ada are lovers against whom the little mermaid Lucette has no
chance...She remains the third wheel, suffers in silence like the mermaid, and
shares with her a watery death."(21)
"The death of the little mermaid must have
been intended as Ada's climx from the beginning...It's astounding that Nabokov
simultaneously manages to keep one eye on the Lübeck cathedral... Esmeralda
and mermaid - the coupling comes directly from Thomas Mann"(22).
"Mermaids prior to Andersen have in common
that they're cold and soulless.. Andersen's undine also wants an immortal
soul, but the actual reason for her ascent into the human world is her silent
love for the prince... In this fairy tale, Andersen was writing in code about
his passion for Edvard Collin, the true love of his life. Like the fairy-tale
prince, Collin tolerated the presence of the unusual old maid as a good friend
in his house, but reserved his bedroom for real women. The Little Mermaid was
written when Collin got married..." (23) "The mermaid is an androgynous male
who loves another man and wants to be close to him, even if it brings him
nothing but torments." (24) and much more with the link to Lolita/Aurora Lee
as presented in TOOL (33).
All private
editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.