The 10 Best Vladimir Nabokov Books

Nabokov’s award-winning biographer, Brian Boyd, wrote a master’s thesis that Vladimir Nabokov called “brilliant” and a Ph.D. thesis that Véra Nabokov thought was the best written about her husband to date. boyd, editor of letters to véra, which tells the decades-long love story between vladimir and véra, chooses the 10 best books by nabokov.

vladimir nabokov’s letters to véra, edited and translated by olga voronina and me, are published on november 4 (knopf). The letters span from 1923, the year the couple met, to 1976, the year before Nabokov’s death. Vera helped Vladimir as the first reader, editor, typist, secretary and agent, although not, despite rumors, as a co-author. but nabokov once wrote to him: “i read parts of his little card (about movement, terrible! i can imagine…) out loud to ilyusha and zinzin and they said now they understood who writes my books for me”. we can see glimpses and shadows or more of véra in four of the books on this top ten list, in the sibyl’s shadow of pale fire, the gift zina mertz, the real life of claire bishop of sebastian knight, and talk, memory is “you”. /p>

Martin Amis is not alone in calling Nabokov the best writer of the 20th century and classifying Ulysses as the best individual novel of the century. However, the two main novels below have higher ratings than even Ulysses on some published lists. don’t take such orders too seriously, but take the books on life from him.

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1. palefire (1962) – crystalline perfection within fractured form makes for what has been called the world’s first and greatest hypertext novel, and the greatest novel of its century. The long autobiographical poem of an Appalachian campus poet is commandeered and annotated line by line by his insanely selfish neighbor, whose notes feature himself and Zembla rather than the poem and the poet. a torrent of stories, a magical whirlwind of opposites, poetry and prose, realism and unbridled fantasy, solid simplicity and wild exile, stasis and haste, sanity and madness, serenity and despair, hilarity and anguish. beneath the radiant surface that dazzles from the beginning lie infinite depths and echoes, sunken cities with trapdoors to more mysteries and wonders.

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2. Lolita (1955): Nabokov’s most accessible masterpiece, told by one of literature’s most seductive monsters, and another often-rated novel of the century. a handsome 38-year-old pedophile hunts down and traps the love of his 12-year-old life. Perhaps the only outrageous work that shocks later readers even more than its initial audience, it assails our imagination by mixing memory and desire, passion and joy, tenderness and cruelty, love and its opposites: lust, self-love, hate. the endless variations on the hunted hunter offer surprises and ironies that deepen as we reread. for all its accessibility, lolita can still elude us more than the mirage of the world of pale fire or the opulent antiworld of ada.

3. ada (1969) – the novel in the nabokov canon that provokes the wildest disagreement. Many hate this saga of fiery sibling incest, others think it’s Nabokov’s crowning achievement. Arguably his richest work, it offers a narrative equivalent to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, filled with upside-down couples, heaven and hell, fiery youth and lustful age, and a literary, lovemaking, and culinary tasting banquet of parody. 19th century elegiac. century fiction and romanticism to proto-steampunk science fiction. Disliked readers assume Nabokov can’t extricate himself from his gifted hero and heroine; readers who love him see his critique of the abuse of privilege of all kinds, from wealth, class, intelligence, confidence, and energy to birth order.

4. speak, memory (1951), the most artistic of autobiographies, with nabokov’s best prose, and since he has often been called the best prose writer in English (or indeed any language), that is to say something. the precision of detail, the controlled radiance of feeling, the force of thought, the evocative attention to unique people and places, the way within the accidents of history and the wear of time, the interweaving of subtly hidden themes, all makes this as charming as nabokov thought the best fiction should be.

5. The Gift(1938) – For many Russian readers, Nabokov’s greatest work. an émigré writer in berlin, his quick mind engages with his slow world, discovers his true art and his true love. Fyodor doesn’t let on until the very end that the love story that emerges only halfway through this long novel has actually shaped it from the start, an acknowledgment that magically redeems what seemed like his lost time. Nabokov challenges Proust and Joyce in his portrait of an artist who discovers how to turn his life into art, his frustration into fulfillment. At the same time, he offers his widest exploration of Russia’s literary heritage, in the nineteenth century and in emigration, and its historical destiny and geographic spread, from East to Asia and West to exile. orhan pamuk has learned a lot from this novel.

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6. the Defense (or the Luzhin Defense, 1930) – one of Nabokov’s two most moving works, and the one I often recommend to cautious readers as a starting point: the story of a chess genius who finds patterns chess players invading the non-chess world just when it has started to mean a lot more to him. Luzhin’s endearing but painful discomfort in everyday existence fades as he towers over the chessboard, but his sublime concentration there makes life ever more difficult to return to.

7. pnin (1957) – nabokov’s other most moving novel. Outwardly, Professor Pnin, with his impossible English, seems just a comical figure on campus; inwardly, he is nobly selfless, dedicated, endlessly lonely and sad. the novel examines humor and sympathy, dislocation and human displacement. even a version of nabokov himself adds to pnin’s problems and threatens all that remains to him, his precarious independence.

8. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) – Nabokov’s first English novel, a humorous and frustrated biography written by a Russian émigré, V., of his English half-brother, the novelist Sebastian Knight. in the course of his frustrated search for a knight and the woman who may have precipitated his death, v. he seems to inadvertently recreate his brother’s wildly inventive stories, so much so that the biography itself begins to resemble another of his knightly works. Using parody as a springboard into the region of higher emotion, this light and fast novel explores life, art, exile, loss, and the shift from one language or love to another in ways painfully close to Nabokov’s experience. at that time.