Bend Sinister

Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov

Well, Nabokov has thrown this whole blog enterprise into question. All I am, apparently, is increasing the tedium of the world
"There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction. The purpose of this foreword is not to show that Bend Sinister belongs or does not belong to 'serious literature' (which is a euphemism for the hollow profundity and the ever-welcome commonplace). I have never been interested in what is called the literature of social comment (in journalistic and commercial parlance: 'great books'). I am not 'sincere', I am not 'provocative', I am not 'satirical'. I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer. Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive and abstract art forms, the entire Orient, symptoms of 'thaw' in Soviet Russia, the Future of Mankind, and so on, leave me supremely indifferent. As is the case of my Invitation to a Beheading - with which this book has obvious affinities - automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations or Orwell's cliches would merely go to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one."

He's not afraid of opinions, whatever about 'general ideas".

The Eye

The Eye - Vladimir Nabokov

"A thing I had long suspected - the world's absurdity - became obvious to me."

The Eye is an early (1930) novel from Nabokov which he translated from the original Russian in the mid sixties. In his foreword he talks of the difficulties faced in translating the title.

"The Russian title of this book is SOGLYADATAY (in traditional transliteration), pronounced 'Sugly-dart-eye', with the accent on the penultimate. It is an ancient military term meaning 'spy' or 'watcher', neither of which extends as flexibly as the Russian word. After toying with 'emissary' or 'gladiator', I gave up trying to blend sound and sense, and contented myself with matching the 'eye' on the end of the long stalk."

The book is set in Berlin in 1924-25 amoung the Russian emigre community but Nabokov doesn't try to make any political point - saying - "they might just as well have been Norwegians in Naples or Ambracians in Ambridge." The nature of emigrant communities, where disparate people are thrown together by the simple fact of their nationality is evident in the book, however.