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In this new book, Stalking Nabokov (Columbia University Press), he offers a selection of his own writings about the remote, arrogant Nabokov, many of them amusing, others academic, all of them fascinating. “I have tried many times to stop writing about him,” Boyd says, “but…he keeps on setting me new assignments, making me offers I cannot refuse.” So Nabokov does speak from beyond the grave.
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In a chapter on Nabokov’s humor, Boyd concludes that Nabokov is funny because “he wants to amuse us, just as he is stylish because he wants to excite our imaginations and to make us realize what the imagination can do.” He mingles laughter with its opposites, “”humor and horror, laughter and loss”. Nabokov applied as many kinds of humor as possible, some fast, some slow-release, some local, some verbal…some barbed,” Boyd writes. Martin Amis agrees, and defines the secret of Nabokov’s prose as its “divine levity.”
Nabokov could be just as witty in person. When an American professor told him of a nun in his class who complained that a couple in the back row would not stop “spooning,” Nabokov said he should have told the nun, “You’re lucky they weren’t forking.”
(via “Lolita” author Vladimir Nabokov speaks from the beyond the grave)
