Where to start with Nabokov
Lolita is the available first encounter and the hardest moral test: attend to the gap between Humbert's language and the harm he tries to hide.
Nabokov's style attracts you, while Lolita's subject makes you wary of mistaking verbal beauty for moral permission.
Reading Lolita for the surface — the prose, the wit, the road trip — and missing the structure, which is one long indictment of the narrator who has charmed you. Or refusing the book entirely on its subject and missing one of the major moral artefacts of twentieth-century literature.
Books in order
- Lolita — Read the John Ray Jr. foreword first; it is the frame Nabokov gives you. Then read slowly, and notice the moments where the prose is most beautiful — those are the moments where the moral work is most active, and where Humbert is most clearly being given the rope.
- Pale Fire — A 999-line poem and the increasingly unhinged commentary that surrounds it. The same Nabokovian procedure as Lolita — a charming, possibly insane narrator, a structure that quietly indicts him — turned this time onto exile and obsessive identification, and read this time mostly as comedy. Read after Lolita; the move feels familiar and the temperature is lighter.
Further reading
- Speak, Memory — Nabokov's memoir of his Russian childhood and European exile — the textbook gentlest entry to his sentences. Not in this catalog yet, but it is the door we would put first if we had it.
- Pnin — The short, warm novel about a Russian émigré professor in a small American college. Nabokov's most lovable book, and a textbook second door. Not in this catalog yet.