Vladimir Nabokov: Genius or narcissist? With
publication of yet another florid paean to Lolita's creator, Viv Groskop asks
what it means to be the ultimate 'writer's writer' (Sunday, 29 May 2011)
Vladimir Nabokov:
Genius or narcissist?The
Independent
"No one inspires the devotion of writers
quite like Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. Here's Jake Arnott, the author of The
Long Firm (Favourite Nabokov: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight): "He has this
uncanny ability to be simultaneously precise and obscure with language; a
conjuror diverting our attention with each trick."/ Mark Crick, the author of
Kafka's Soup (his favourite? Pale Fire), says: "Almost everything about Nabokov
entertains and amuses me: his habit of writing in pencil on index cards; his
eccentricities as a teacher; his butterfly collecting; his decision to live in
the [Montreux Palace] hotel in Switzerland; his intense dislike of Dostoevsky."
A new book by the French-born, New York-based writer Lila Azam Zanganeh, The
Enchanter (Allen Lane, £20), proclaims Nabokov as the ultimate writer's writer
[...] Perhaps he's only a writer's writer. And a certain kind of
(self-regarding?) writer at that. Martin Amis: "I bow to no one in my love for
this great and greatly inspiring genius." Rushdie again: "The most important
writer ever to cross the boundary between one language and another." Others
bowing in worship include John Updike, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides and Zadie
Smith. But these maybe aren't people you look to for book recommendations. In
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby's brilliant reading diary of
accessible must-reads, Nabokov features not at all./Are we wrong to be put off?
Rupert Thomson, the author of This Party's Got to Stop (Granta, £8.99), says: "I
find the phrase 'writer's writer' something of a back-handed compliment as it
suggests a certain obscurity. It might even be a euphemism for 'not widely
read'. Given that Nabokov wrote Lolita, an international bestseller, he hardly
qualifies. To my mind, 'writer's writer' ought to be the highest of compliments.
What is a writer, after all, but the most acute and passionate of readers? Look
at it that way and a writer's writer is actually a reader's writer."
JM: "A writer's
writer is actually a reader's writer"? I'd have added a
specification, the word "good," as employed by VN, to
qualify readers, to Groskop's conclusion, to focus
on Nabokov as a "good reader's writer.".
However, the end-result came out as somehow pat or insignificant.
To give back its original
headliney glitter I extended the sentence to make it into
"Nabokov is the ultimate good reader's writer" (but only when we
consider who is Nabokov's ideal reader, i.e, himself...) but got caught in a
loop.