Vladimir Nabokov – Page 3 – Cannonball Read 17

Oh, how I sometimes yearn for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel!

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov

May 10, 2019 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This is Vladimir Nabokov’s first English language novel, whereas he previously published 8 or so Russian language novels living in various countries, publishing under a pseudonym, and living the life of a political (but rich) exile. He also grew up learning multiple language including Russian, French, German, and English and so while a departure from his previous novels, it’s still quite in sync with other parts of his life. The novel is written as a kind literary memoir, or more precisely almost as a set […]

Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing

May 29, 2018 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

It’s hard to properly write the title for this memoir in the boxes on this site because it has a comma in the title and that gums up the works a little. The title is an apostrophe, telling Memory to Speak. I don’t mean to explain that to you, but for all the years I knew of this title and thought about reading it, I couldn’t ever make sense of it. I read Harry Potter in high school and didn’t the joke of Diagon Alley […]

Triptych of no real consequence

February 10, 2018 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Philip Roth – The Breast 2/5 Cynthia Ozick – The Shawl 4/5 Vladimir Nabokov – The Eye 3/5 So these three short novels or novellas don’t really have much to do with one another ostensibly, but I read them one after the other on a Friday sick day and thought a little about their connections or rather what connections I might draw on them. To start, I will tell you what each one of them is about. The Shawl starts off in the […]

It’s gross you guys.

January 20, 2018 by tillie 12 Comments

Lolita is a narrative that permeates pop culture, in advertisements, references and romanticizing of things that are not okay. This narrative probably originates from the 1997 film adaptation starring Jeremy Irons: When I was a teenager this novel was a way to live out my own sexuality and confused feelings about adults around me. These adults were mostly male teachers making Humbert Humbert the perfect stand-in. However engaging with this story as an adult is a bit different. It’s gross you guys. Lolita is […]

A fantastic farrago of evil

August 10, 2017 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This book has some serious payoff at the end, and of course a wonderful fake index that clarifies and makes everything right. If you don’t know this one, this is a novel in the form of an academic annotation of a long poem. The poem itself is a 1000 (technically 999) line poem about a pastoral and academic life, love and marriage, childhood, parenting, death. Like what most poems are about, with a kind of erudition and educated set of allusions. The notes on this […]

Tomorrow all his youth, his Russia, was coming back to him again.

May 18, 2017 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Something has been lost in the inter-connectivity of the modern world. The distances that used to separate us physically, created emotional gulfs that also separated us. One of the strongest themes in Lonesome Dove is how the actual physical size and landscape of the American West created this kind of emotional distance. Even yesterday as my girlfriend and I were having an unofficial anniversary dinner, we got on the topic of the weeks and months leading up to our meeting three years ago. This isn’t an […]

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