One thing I find
hardest to do is blast a novel by a well-known, widely-admired, great
writer. So I struggle to write this
review of Bend Sinister by Vladimir
Nabokov. I read this novel long before I
started keeping track of my reading with this journal more than 10 years
ago. Perhaps I notice the things which
bothered me more now that I have experience writing these reviews. Reading with a possible public review in mind
certainly has affected these writings.
Nabokov is well-known for his meticulous pursuit of the correct word in
a sentence. I have heard tell he
sometimes spent hours trying to find a precise word to fill a blank in a
sentence, of a chapter, of a novel. I admit
to sometimes searching for a particular word, but I never spent more than a few
minutes – sometimes with the help of a dictionary and a thesaurus.
When I began re-reading Bend
Sinister, I was immediately struck by his diction. In the first chapter, he wrote, “An oblong
puddle in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with
quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see nether sky. Surrounded.
I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun leaves
have stuck. Drowned, I should say,
before the puddle had shrunk to its present size” (1). Can readers spot the two “made-up
words”? Can you spot words that seem
just a bit pretentious? Not to forget to
mention some rather strange syntax?
Now, I pride myself on a higher than usual vocabulary, but on the other
hand I have long fought the fight against obfuscation in my diction. I suspect the latter was a reaction to the
legalese I suffered through for about 15 years.
I might also blame my admiration for Hemingway, that is, his diction not
his misogyny. I even find this paragraph
a bit pretentious. What is a
reader/writer to do?
Well, I have decided. I am going
to tell the world I believe the emperor has no clothes or, rather, the emperor
has too many dictionary pages stuck to his crown.
Here is part of another paragraph my reading notes labeled as
poetic. Nabokov wrote, “November trees,
poplars, I imagine, two of them growing straight out of the asphalt: all of
them in the cold bright sun, bright richly furrowed bark and an intricate sweep
of numberless burnished bare twigs, old gold—because getting more of the
falsely mellow sun in the higher air.
Their immobility is in contrast with the spasmodic ruffling of the inset
reflection—for the visible emotion of a tree is the mass of its leaves, and
there remain hardly more than thirty-seven or so here and there on one side of
the tree. They just flicker a little, of
a neutral tint, but burnished by the sun to the same ikontinct…” (2). “Ikontinct” is not in my OED or my Random House
Dictionary of well-over twenty-four hundred pages. It is amazing how a single word can spoil
otherwise wonderful poetic phrasing.
Okay, so now I must choose: slog through hundreds of pages with who
knows how many unidentifiable words, or revert with a measure of pretension of
my own to that old Latin phrase: Quot
Libros, Quam Breve Tempus. Look it
up if you wish. 2 stars.
--Chiron, 3/5/17
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