Karl Ove Knausgaard's recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine, "My Saga," includes a few paragraphs on Lolita (in comparison with Kerouac's On the Road), just past its mid-point.  [  ] -SB

Jansy Mello: The link worked fine for me. For those who didn’t reach it, a brief summary with its VN reference below ( I hope we have permission to quote from the article?):

“Inside the terminal, I stopped at a bookstore to look at travel guides. I still hadn’t decided where to go… One of my favorite books about the U.S. is Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” which among many other things is also a kind of road novel. It describes a journey through the small-town world of post-World War II America, where the protagonist, Humbert Humbert, is constantly on the lookout for distractions for his child mistress…// “Lolita” came out in the U.S. in 1958, one year after another road novel, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”  Oddly enough, the journeys that these two books describe also begin at the same time…It would be hard to imagine two more dissimilar fictional landscapes. This is because Kerouac describes it from the inside, with no distance, this is the America he grew up in, and he is so much an integrated part of it that he seems to embody its very soul…There are no points of contact with that America in Nabokov’s novel, aind if you read the two books simultaneously, the reason becomes obvious: In “Lolita,” all is dissembling, there are only signs, everything stands for something else, and the one and perhaps only thing that is authentic, the child’s reality, is desired from an impossible distance, the breaching of which destroys it completely. In “On the road,” nothing stands in the way of the authentic, except the rules of formal life; when they have been overcome, the glittering night opens to anyone who desires to enter it.  The naïveté of this is astounding, but so is the power. //Now, both Nabokov’s book and Kerouac’s were nearly 60 years old, and themselves a part of this country’s history. But the conflict between life and the imitation of life, and the impossible desire for authenticity, was still being explored in American literature, where…// I couldn’t find any travel guides…”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/magazine/karl-ove-knausgaard-travels-through-america.html?_r=0

This is the part directly related to V.Nabokov. However, the first paragraphs describe this Norwegian writer’s experiences with the first European settlements  in America and his description of Vinland is particularly appealing. It brought to my mind Vinelander’s map and other distant posts in the North American continent mentioned more than once in “ADA,” so I’d like to quote from it, too, since it touches deeply, albeit indirectly, onto something deeply Nabokovian.  And, of course, there are also those ancient sagas mentioned in Pale Fire with their verbal register of travels, conquests and feats, so different from the dreamy  descriptive aspect of a scenery that floats through ADA:

“..The editor proposed that I travel to Newfoundland and visit the place where the Vikings had settled, then rent a car and drive south…I accepted the offer at once. I had just read and written about the Icelandic sagas, and the chance to see the actual place where two of them were partly set, in the area they called Vinland, was impossible to turn down [  ]When we learned about Viking exploration in school, I never imagined that it had actually happened [  ] After spending the night in St.John’s, Newfoundland, I boarded the small plane for St. Anthony at dawn [  ] That the Viking would sooner or later discover the North American continent was perfectly logical. They came from the sweeping and rugged Atlantic coast of Norway… They colonized Iceland toward the end of the ninth century, then discovered Greenland a few generations later and colonized it too. The journey from the west coast of Greenland to the North American continent was only another two days by sea.[  ]The land they caught sight of first they named Helleland (in all probability it was Baffin Island);the next, they named Markland (which is probably Labrador) ; and the third, they named Vinland. [  ] A wooden boardwalk leading down from the building toward the plain where the actual ruins of the settlement lay was in some place covered by snowdrifts, in others bare…I walked down the slope.. In front of me lay a world so beautiful and so cruel that it numbed my senses….It was completely silent. ..The silence did something with the landscape. Usually something is making a sound…here everything was still. All sounds belong to the moment, they are part of the present, the world of change, while the soundless belongs to the unchanging. In silence lies age…”**

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*Ardis Hall — the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis — this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America — for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams? (Ada,part Five)

**Ada,part Four:   ‘Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,’ says John Shade, a modem poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher (‘Martin Gardiner’) in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165. Space flutters to the ground, but Time remains between thinker and thumb, when Monsieur Bergson uses his scissors.