(urth) Introduction and Breath
Jerry Friedman
jerry_friedman at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 13 21:07:17 PDT 2011
From: Allan Anderson <rubel at goosemoon.org>
...
>I haven't really thought about Nabakov in a critical fashion, so perhaps that's
>why little occurs to me when comparing him to Wolfe. What's an interesting place
>
>to start? The way they present their narrators?
Here's my post at NABOKV-L recommending Wolfe to the people there:
http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0212&L=nabokv-l&P=R9842
Here's one by another person:
http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0504&L=nabokv-l&P=626
Let me also quote a letter Nabokov wrote to Katharine White at the New Yorker,
who had rejected his story "The Vane Sisters" (which is on a rather Wolfean
theme):
"Most of the stories I am contemplating (and some I have written in the
past--you actually published one with such an 'inside'--the one about the old
Jewish couple and their sick boy) will be composed on these lines, according to
this system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the
superficial semitransparent story."
It's not Nabokov's best sentence, but it sounds distinctly like Wolfe's system
to me. At least a lot of people here read Wolfe that way.
(By the way, I recommend that story about the old Jewish couple, "Signs and
Symbols"--though over 60 years later, there's no consensus on the
interpretation.)
Jerry Friedman
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