The current fashion of listing the 10 or 100 Best films, hotels, photos, books may sometimes bring susprises to its users. A few years ago I brought up "The little black book BOOKS" edited by Lucy Daniel (Cassell Illustrated), because its cover held "Lolita" (with Kubrick's glasses and a lollipop) and carried news about Nabokov, among the announced "a century of the greatest books, writers, characters, passages and events that rocked the literary world."

This time I got the 2006 "501 Must-Read Books" by Bounty Books, in a 2011 Brazilian edition referring to "Larousse."

A desultory look led me to Nabokov's name in two distinct chapters.

The first one is "Memoirs" (selected by Denise Imwold) with St.Augustine's "Confessions", Simone de Beauvoir's  "Memoirs d'une jeune-fille rangée"", Roal Dahl's "Tales of Childhood"; Helen Hanff's "84mCharing Cross Road", Herzen's "Childhood, Youth and Exile"...and with Nabokov's "Speak,Memory" ( I found, among other recommended works by VN: The Luzhin Defense, Laughter in the Dark, Ada or Ardor, Terra Incognita, Lolita, Pale Fire, Details of a Sunset and other short-stories, Strong Opinions).
The second is under "Modern Fiction" (selected by Gabrielle Mander and Carola Campbell) and the chosen novel is "Lolita." Other recommended works this time are listed as: The REal Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Pnin, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor, Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins and ("unfinished") The Original of Laura.

 

 

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Sandy Klein sends a review by Larry Hardesty of B. Boyd's "Stalking Nabokov"   http://bostonglobe.com/arts/2011/12/09/stalking-nabokov-brian-boyd/uUyG9LiHhGD6uYVqunzWoL/story.html  In his concluding remarks Hardesty affirms:" 'Stalking Nabokov' advances a consistent and intriguing reading of his work. Boyd’s Nabokov is someone who felt imprisoned both by the linearity of time and the insularity of his own consciousness, and who saw fiction as a way to slip the bonds of both."  He also mentions the biographer's "powerful corrective to a prevailing view of Nabokov (1899-1977) as, for good or ill, a monger of visual detail.’’ because for B.Boyd "the telling Nabokovian detail is so memorable precisely because it slices through a skein of narrative summary, verbal gamesmanship, and first-person characterizations."

 

JM: Brian Boyd concludes that Nabokov feels imprisoned by "the insularity of his own consciousness," a theme that has recently popped up in the VN-L in connection to Bend Sinister*. 

Nevertheless, I still  cannot figure out what that expression, "insularity of consciousness," means.  Among the regular analogies for the sensation of being imprisoned in time, in space, by the body and by other physical limitations, Pale Fire's bee-hive is particularly interesting: "Space is a swarming in the eyes; and time,/A singing in the ears. In this hive I'm/Locked up." when we compare it to VN's paragraph in SO: “When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos...I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”