From award-winning literary scholar Robert Alter, a masterful
exploration of how Nabokov used artifice to evoke the dilemmas,
pain, and exaltation of the human condition
Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an
ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his
readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and
puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of
times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes.
Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer
uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how
Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its
complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of
contemporary politics on our lives.
In these illuminating and exquisitely written essays, Alter spans the
breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short
stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the
self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing
very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist
who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human
relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to
the ways political ideologies can distort human values.
Offering timeless insights into literature's most fabulous artificer,
Nabokov and the Real World makes an elegant and compelling case for
Nabokov's relevance today.
