Where to start with Nabokov
Lolita is not the entry — it is the trap. Start with the late game novel about exile that lets you meet his sentences without his most uncomfortable subject.
You have heard Nabokov is the great prose stylist of the twentieth century in English, you suspect Lolita is more morally serious than its reputation, and you want a door that lets you meet his sentences before its subject.
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.
The reading path
- 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.
Why this order
Nabokov's reputation as a stylist obscures the fact that his structural intelligence is what makes the prose load-bearing — every sentence is doing moral work that the surface tries to hide, and reading him only for the surface is reading him only for the trap.
Held back, and why
- 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.