All-Time Greatest Listmaker?: Vladimir Nabokov

Between the Books of the States and the best of the year flood, even a listmaking fiend like me is getting a bit weary of putting things in little bulleted sets. So it's like a rejuvenating shot of caffeine to watch one of the all-time great listmakers (yes, I could happily make a list of the top listmakers) at the top of his gleeful game. Thanks to Maud Newton and the NYer's Book Bench, who featured this clip earlier this month, here's Vladimir Nabokov, in what is apparently a French documentary (though he speaks in English--when he's not reading the opening of Lolita in Russian). Enjoy the gleeful and adolescent precision with which he declares, "My greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order:

1. Joyce's Ulysses
2. Kafka's "Transformation" [usually known as "The Metamorphosis"]
3. Bely's Petersburg
4. and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time."

(Which of these is not like the others, at least in its current reputation as a world masterpiece?)

Even better is his list of the false pretenders: "I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called 'great books.' That, for instance,

• Mann's asinine Death in Venice
• or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written Doctor Zhivago
• or Faulkner's corncobby chronicles

can be considered masterpieces, or at least what journalists term 'great books' is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair."

And speaking of gleeful disdain, watch his sheer pleasure (it's infectious) in listing "the things I detest":

• italicized passages in a novel, which are meant to represent the protagonist's "cloudbursts of thought"
• background music, canned music, piped-in music, portable music, mix-room (?) music, inflicted music
• concise dictionaries, abridged manuals
• journalistic cliches
• "the moment of truth--the moment of truth!"
• "humility"--ha, splendid word

Enjoy:

--Tom

Comments

[Mrinal Bose on December 17, 2008 at 07:29 AM]

I appreciate the list, but Boris Pasternak was never a pretender, and his Doctor Zivago was neither melodramatic nor vilely written. In fact, it's an honest and insightful narrative of Russia's
early-socialism chaotic days, which is still a pleasure to read.