The Day of Judgement by Salvatore Satta – Old Dreams

Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement is a wonderful book, as warm and pleasant as the hills and valleys of Sardinia it takes as its setting. More than that, it is a classic, without a shadow of a doubt. I enjoyed last week’s Satantango more, but as much as I loved it, it is a book destined for people who read, more than people who live. If I go around the country homes of my friends the books that I find there will not be by Joyce, or Woolf, or Beckett, but rather Austen, Hardy, and Kipling. These latter group are no better or worse than the first, but they bring with them a prose that is simple, clear, and a vehicle for their books’ plots, instead of anything deliberately striving to be more. They are not, in a primary sense, experimenters. And one day, perhaps, they may be joined on their shelves by Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement too.

A Classic, for Better or Worse

Pots and pots of ink have dried up in trying to explain what a literary classic is. With The Day of Judgement I simply had a feeling, as I was reading, of something ineffable, indescribable. It had, I would say, a certain bearing about itself. The book is not long, but it carries itself like an elder statesman. This may be in part because Salvatore Satta started writing it when he was almost seventy, after a long career as a jurist. There is no sense of rushing or urgency about the pages, no matter what the author himself felt as he was writing them. It is a book of anecdotes, of spilling digressions, written by an old man about his home. And – and this is what is so rare in our times, when modernism, modern science, and worst of all the horrors of the Second World War, broke that particularly Victorian self-assurance that let us preach what we believed without self-question – it has the gravitas and casual wisdom of someone who has lived, and wishes to share their experience with others. Whether you like him or not, it reminds me of Steinbeck at his best.

Salvatore Satta
Salvatore Satta (1902-1975) was a jurist of note during his life. When he began writing The Day of Judgement he was almost seventy. It is the fruit of a lifetime’s worth of wisdom and love.

Chronicle of a Town

To call this a novel is wrong. It is more a chronicle than a novel, or perhaps a story in Benjamin’s sense. Its heart is the town of Nuoro, in central Sardinia, and Don Sebastiano Sanna Carboni, a nobleman who lives and works there. For a period of perhaps twenty years his life and the life of his village is followed and recounted by the narrator, an older man trying to remember and record his past. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect, place, or person from among the village’s seven thousand. We meet schoolteachers, priests, swindlers, shepherds, and learn about making wine, or about the potential origins of the village, or the design of the houses. Moments such as electrification of street lamps, or the first arrival of radical political ideas, are recounted with tenderness and honesty. But as the book progresses, and the world itself “progresses”, there come about ever more challenges to this once so isolated mountain village, and its way of life.

A “Truth” to Challenge – the Themes

Through the way that the old man recounts his “truth” The Day of Judgement further gains the regalia of a true classic. Because of its structure, with each chapter detailing a different event, or the struggles of a different man or woman, there is an extraordinary thematic variety within these pages. The conflicts between husbands and wives, between fathers and sons, between nobles and the lower orders, between conservatives and socialists, between individuals and the state, between the church and the common man, between teachers and students, are all described. Each side is given its say, and in such a way that I can already sense that this is one of those books which like a seed grow with time and the experiences of their readers. One day I may well support the fathers, instead of the sons, even if today that is not entirely the case. The “truth” of the narrator doesn’t mean a domineering world view, but rather a series of suggestions and opinions which can be challenged or accepted, but are not meant by any stretch of the imagination to be absolute.

Progress – What Good is it?

Part of this comes from the fundamental tension at the heart of the book – between the desire for progress and the inherent conservatism of humankind. I don’t think Satta himself truly knew where he lay in this battle – and this is part of the book’s greatness. Though the narrator himself at one point says that “there is nothing I detest so much as the past”, the evidence of the book tells a different story. The “Day of Judgement” of the book’s title refers not only to the fate of humankind before God in some strands of Christian theology, but also to the role of the writer here. Satta’s narrator admits that he is reviving the dead of his own past and history, from the early twentieth century and a little before, and making them give an account for themselves before the reader. And we are supposed to judge for ourselves whether these men and women, living in the village, have lived their lives badly or well. The narrator can only show us who they were – the rest is up to us.

Nostalgia for a World now Lost

A plaintive nostalgia pervades the book. A longing for a world which was only Nuoro, or at least a world which ended at the sea. Nuoro is a place, for Don Sebastiano, “where there was room for everyone” and the way that the book goes through each of the characters and professions, the very nature of the book’s ordered structure, formally reflects a stability and certainty about life and one’s place in it. Yet there is also an occasional lyricism too, notably in chapter V’s lavish description of making bread, which has “all the solemnity of a ritual”, and then later on when discussing “the pagan mystery” of the vineyard. Here the prose itself takes on the same magical quality of its subject matter, and it’s hard not to want to be there yourself, hard at work on the fields or kneading dough.

Picture of houses in Nuoro
Nuoro today. Perhaps not that much has changed, after all

Through work there comes a sense of community and continuity. People visit each other, sit and play cards together or simply chat in a way that is alien to much of the modern world with its hustle and bustle. It is from a time before time, before precision. It is a stasis of a positive sort, which is differentiated from the present most strikingly by the hope of parents that their children will live (as Don Sebastiano hopes) just the same life as their parents – that they may be just as lucky in having such a good life, instead of eternally striving after a better one. It ties in with the religious argument in the work – that we should see the blessedness of our own lives, rather than in their potentiality.

The Sympathy of a Great Soul

It is his unbounded sympathy, too, that shows Satta as an earnest writer. He cares for all of his characters, from the grimiest urchins to the nobles like Don Sebastiano. It means that whenever progress seems almost inevitable, he is always willing to show kindness towards those it does not benefit, such as the canons who are forbidden to ring the church bells for the beginning of school by a new arrival from outside of the town. The cessation of the bells is one of the saddest moments of the book, because it represents a huge loss of pride and self-respect for the canons. With the ending of the bells’ song, there is also a hidden but no less important loss for the townsfolk of a part of their identity, and when we are told that “the bell rope hung sadly above Ziu Longu’s bench, like the rope after a hanging”, it’s hard not to think that the image is supposed to call to mind the small death inside their souls too.

What Does Modernity Mean?

What modernity means is a loss of the sanctity of the world, a loss of music, a loss of community. It means problems, for “Problems, of whatever kind, arise when the simple, humble certainties of life begin to fail”. Alongside the loss of the bells, another poignant image of the end of street lighting in the village. Before the introduction of electricity, a man would go around lighting the oil lamps, one by one. Behind him, we are told, would follow the town’s children, playing a game between them of trying to catch as many of the spent matches as possible. It is a stupid, childish game, but what it means is community.

Electrification “was destiny itself” but that hardly stops it from being a force for the destruction of the sacred past. The narrator once again deploys a characteristically reticent phrase for when the lights first turn on all at once: for the town “in some mysterious way felt that it had entered history”. It is up to us, again, to decide whether history means good or ill. But it’s hard to avoid the ominous note that creeps into the prose. “The north wind had risen, and the bulbs hanging in their shades in the Corso began to sway sadly, light and shadow, shadow and light, making the night-time nervous. This had not happened with the oil lamps”.

Tragedy of the Present: the Invention of Politics

With modernity also comes politics. Sardinia, on the periphery of Italy, has never been historically important, and Nuoro, at its centre, even less so. But one day, the narrator says, the younger generation started reading Avanti!, a radical socialist paper, and politics arrived in the village. The old certainties of life – that people stayed in their social positions and jobs, that there was a kind of harmony between all walks of life – suddenly begin to be questioned. People, told of inequality, begin to believe in it, and conflicts that had not even been conceivable a hundred years earlier, now take pride of place. Whether they are rightly motivated or not is less important here than the fact that they undermine the conservative feeling of the world as organised and correct as it is. They suggest change where hitherto it wouldn’t even have been a concept.

Politics is all well and good in theory, but in practice something else happens. The movement is co-opted by a certain Don Ricciotti, a man who feels that Don Sebastiano has done him wrong by buying Riccioti’s father’s house at auction when the latter was dealing with bankruptcy. Using his talent for giving speeches Ricciotti is able to gain a sizable support base in the town, just as elections are coming up. He hopes to use the power of office to force Don Sebastiano to return to him the house that he considers his by right. In these speeches, Don Sebastiano is targeted by name as one of the swindlers who is oppressing the poor, hardworking citizens of Nuoro, though there is no evidence elsewhere in the book that this is the case. The story serves as a grave indictment of the dangers of populism, wherever it may be found, and it is only by luck and hard work that ultimately Ricciotti’s efforts are thwarted. Perhaps what Satta wants to say here is that the world would be better off without politics, and the manipulation and deceit that seemingly has to come with it.

Picture of Landscape by Nuoro
The countryside around Nuoro. Much may be lost, but the landscape so beautifully evoked by Satta still remains almost untouched.

The Problems of the Past I – Woman’s Place

Yet for all this uncertainty, for all this scepticism towards the various changes in his own life, the narrator cannot turn his back on the future, and neither does he blind us to the acute problems of the past. Perhaps the most fully fleshed out character, and the most tragic, of the story is Don Sebastiano’s wife, Donna Vincenza. She is described as intelligent, but the society that she is in massively restricts her freedoms: she’s barely even allowed outside of her own house. The chapters centring on her life are filled with gloom and despair, and she is repeatedly described as “trapped”. The lives of the other women are no better. Those who engage in prostitution, for example, are forced to go to another village to give birth or otherwise deal with illegitimate offspring. The implications reveal a misery and disquiet underlying the apparent peace of the past. It is a man’s peace only.

Problems of the Past II – the Dark Side of Stasis

And it is not only the women who suffer here. The darker side of stasis is sometimes revealed when The Day of Judgement touches upon poverty. The book is not critical of poverty per se, and certainly not overly critical about the rigid social classes found within Nuoro which likely perpetuate it, but there are moments when the beautiful, structured façade of Sardinian life in the book suddenly shows its cracks. The moment that struck me most strongly was one of morbid horror. Near the end of the book the summer’s weather becomes unnaturally violent with strong winds and as a result a plague sets in among the fields of the countryside. The lands of almost everybody are left severely damaged – everybody’s lands except those of Don Sebastiano, that is.

When he goes to inspect his fields he meets the peasants who have been looking after them, and they are eager to explain to him why they are undamaged. But to his dismay and disgust they reveal that it is all due to a crucified dog and left hanging on the door of their hut. Don Sebastiano is left speechless and full of rage. The superstitions which at other times make for proof of the magic of the past are now transformed into something monstrous and unnerving. When the peasants then mention a problem with the peasants of the neighbouring farm, Don Sebastiano tells them to sort it out among themselves. And they do, with an axe in the dead of night. The book reminds us that for all the good things that have undoubtedly been lost with progress and time, much has been gained too. The end to the mindless violence, black superstition, and the rise of modern medicine are all things to be rightly praised.

Conclusion – The Judgement

Salvatore Satta did not finish The Day of Judgement, but the ending is in no way abrupt – instead, it finishes on an elegiac note that ties the whole work together. The chronicler could well have reckoned up every single soul of Nuoro’s then seven thousand, and no doubt would have, had they lived that long, but we should be grateful for all the pages that we have. It is a beautiful, lovely, and kind book that stands to my mind for everything the best literature can be. It is exciting, hopeful, and timeless. Read it again and again. I know I will.

For more about the ambiguous development of modernity in rural communities, have a look at my thoughts on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

Picture of Salvatore Satta is in the public domain

Picture of Nuoro houses by Max.oppo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Picture of Landscape around Nuoro also by Max.oppo

Satantango Review – False Hopes and False Prophets

I finished Satantango, by the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai (in George Szirtes’ superb translation), yesterday and am still reeling from the experience. Really, I had been reeling from the first pages onwards. This is the best book, the most exciting book, the most challenging book, that I have read in a long time. The only book by a living author I can compare it to without understating my admiration would be Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Both works are bleak and challenging meditations on apocalypse, on the state of humanity at the very edge of collapse. But even to compare it to Blood Meridian detracts from Satantango’s own unique and demonic magic. I’ve really read nothing like it before. It creates, in form and structure and plot, a completely new world.

So far Satantango is most famous for its 7ish hour film adaptation by Béla Tarr – naturally enough, since the translation was only published in 2012. I myself haven’t seen the film though – I actually came across the book and its author while browsing in Waterstones for something by Kazantzakis (my review of Zorba the Greek is here) and the really nice editions of Krasznahorkai’s works elsewhere in the “K” section caught my eye. From that I drew near enough for my short-sighted self to be able to see the titles, and I was immediately excited by The Melancholy of Resistance, and read the first page since I had time to spare. The prose, with its winding sentences and no paragraph breaks, put me off – especially since the book was already four hundred or so pages long. I put the book back, noted the author’s name, and bought myself Zorba the Greek as I had planned.

Once I had finished that, though, I went to the college library and gave Krasznahorkai a second chance. The only book there was Satantango, so I no longer had a say in the matter. I took it home with me for this Easter break.

Picture of László Krasznahorkai

László Krasznahorkai (b. 1954) has a rather devilishly mysterious look about him, and his Satantango is devilishly good too, even if its world is bleak.

Introduction – An Easter Story

As luck, or fate, or something else entirely would have it, Satantango is something of an Easter work. It begins, at least, with a resurrection. News of the return of two men, Irimiás and his helper Petrina, who were thought dead for over a year, interrupts the bickering over money going on between two men living in the small “Estate” where much of Satantango’s action takes place. These two resurrected men (the second chapter is entitled “We are resurrected”) have a reputation for their skill and adeptness in making money, and the bickerers decide to try to track them down, and in doing so see if they could make themselves some cash for their troubles. The other chapters of the first half of the book flit between the different major characters of the village, from the doctor to the schoolmaster, the local prostitutes to the barman, and detail their own reactions to the news. Gradually, they all converge upon the bar, the central location of the Estate, and there they begin to drink and dance, while they await the arrival of the man, Irimiás, who they all take to be their saviour.

The World and its Inhabitants

Krasznahorkai does an excellent job creating the tense atmosphere of a tiny village. In the first half of the book, characters of each chapter rarely meet those of other chapters, but through a process of endlessly layering more and more references to their names and personalities, Satantango gives the impression of a living, breathing community, so that when we do finally meet a given character, we’ve already heard all the gossip, and meet them as we would an old friend or enemy. There’s Mrs Halics, the most religious of the townsfolk, but a hypocrite at heart; Mrs Schmidt, promiscuous towards half the village but longing most of all for another night with Irimiás; and Futaki, the gloomy, melancholic sceptic with a limp. And many other characters, in both senses of the word, besides.

These people, trapped in an Estate whose owners are nowhere to be found, whose machinery no longer works, and whose business and industry has long-since departed, are in desperate need of some kind of salvation. Hopeless schemes for making money or getting away are made and fail by the second. In the first chapter alone Futaki and another man decide to betray a third, but only because Futaki caught the first man before he could betray him instead. Mrs Schmidt’s infidelity to her husband is only one of the many betrayals of a people who quite literally live in the mud. A recurring image in Satantango is the slaughterhouse, where people are merely meat. The first part of the book is in many ways a catalogue of the seven deadly sins of a fallen people: very few people here have any kind of positivity or goodness about them, for better or worse, which can add to the heaviness and challenge of reading through.

Style – Mud on the Page

But the main challenge when it comes to reading is that like The Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango is written in what I take to be Krasznahorkai’s signature style. There are no paragraph breaks, and sentences are long, intricate things. At first it was hard to read, but then I grew used to it. The whole book has a flowing, heavy quality to it, like mud. The decay and purification of the environment that the characters live in – nobody cleans, and cockroaches and other insects are constantly waging war for new territory – is marked by a similar decay in the prose. We sense that sentiment, expressed by Beckett at the end of The Unnamable, that “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”, in the way that the only thing that seems to be carrying on the prose is the way that the character haven’t died yet and that somewhere, misplaced though it may be, they have their hope.

It is difficult to tell where their hope should be placed, if indeed it should be placed anywhere. The novel has a strange, unnerving, supernatural side to it. It begins with bells, ringing even though there are no churches nearby, and that stop as suddenly as they start. But it is only some characters who seem to be able to hear them, which adds another layer of confusion. Elsewhere, in the bar, invisible spiders cover everything in cobwebs at a miraculous speed. And then, in the second part, Irimiás himself sees something that he cannot possibly explain rationally, try as he might. The novel’s chapter titles only add to the confusion, with part II’s chapter IV being titled “Heavenly Vision? Hallucination?” – nothing is given to us as a certainty.

Irimiás – The prophet the townsfolk need… or the one they deserve?

The character Irimiás, the resurrected one, inevitably forms the centre of any discussion of hope in the novel. It is he who, like a spider, literally brings together all of the major characters into the bar as if stuck in his web, and then disperses them as the novel goes on. He is a strange figure. Many characters see him as their saviour, and there are further parallels with Jesus too. He has two personal followers, Petrina and a boy, Sanyi, who go with him everywhere and do as he says. Petrina even confuses “Evangelical” with “evangelist” when describing himself. Yet if he is a god or even a kind of Christian, he is a strange one. When he speaks, it is rarely to espouse a Christian viewpoint. At the beginning of part II he gives a long speech, exhorting the townsfolk to repent and do better, but their response, privately, is just to assume he is joking. When he encounters the supernatural in part II he dismisses it, and God too, as unreal. His views are more likely a bleak nihilism of the sort he shows when alone with his closest followers, dismissing all hope and everything else: “we are trapped forever. We’re properly doomed. It’s best not to try either, best not believe your eyes.” Indeed, his nihilism is so great that he dismisses his senses rather than believe something. “We think we’re breaking free but all we’re doing is readjusting the locks.” And yet, he leads the townsfolk out into a wilderness; he gives them, all the same, a hope; he helps them. It’s hard to say why that might be. Harder still to know what to think when there are hints, in the background, of him stockpiling arms and munitions. He remains, even after finishing Satantango, an enigma.

Part of the reason that he is not closer to a traditional view of Jesus is that it seems a traditional Jesus is far from what the townsfolk, Mrs Halics excepted, actually want. Ultimately, it seems like almost all of their problems are due to money, or rather its absence. The girls who are forced into prostitution, are after money to pay for their mother, who refuses to work. The early scheming and betrayal of Futaki and Schmidt that takes place in the first chapter all hinges on trying to get enough money to escape. The barman obsesses about money too. And in this vein Irimiás, who is famous at least partially for being able to make money anywhere, also has his place. It is he who is hated by the barman precisely for his past debts (before his “death” Irimiás drank a huge amount without paying). That is to say, of all the characters, Irimiás is immune to money – he alone doesn’t need to pay it. He, indeed, has somehow transcended it.

The Politics of Negligence

There is also a political angle to the work. Published originally in Hungary in 1985, Krasznahorkai himself said that it was a miracle it made it past the censor given the political content of the work . But the politics of the text is not immediately apparent. These people, after all, are locked off in their Estate, and apart from their names there’s little indication that the work takes place in Hungary at all. But politics comes in as soon as we start asking questions. Why has the Estate fallen into decay? Because state support for the machinery needed for local industry has dried up. The cultural centre has also lost its funding and is in a state of disrepair. There is no longer a school for the headmaster to teach at. The depression and desperation of the citizens is an implicit critique on the system that has left them in this state – not of authoritarianism as bad and negligent governance in general. Anywhere where people are left behind, whether it be rural Hungary or my own native North-West Scotland, might see itself reflected in these pages. And in this context, Irimiás’ hints of weapons buying take on a more sinister note. It may well be that what the man is planning is revolution.

The ending of Satantango only complicates matters. I shan’t spoil it here, but it is one of those endings which makes the entirety of the material up to that point take on a new light, but not in a way that cheapens it. I was left sitting there, overpowered by the implications, for long after I’d closed the book at last. It’s rare that an ending does that to me. And I think when I eventually go back and read the book again, there will be a lot of new things for me to discover.

Conclusion

I loved Satantango because for me, it was one of those books that reveal our conceptions of what literature can and can’t do are limited, and show us the way forward. I feel like others must have felt when Kafka first emerged from Prague into the rest of the world and reshaped a world’s literature. Well, maybe Krasznahorkai isn’t that good – after only one novel it’s too early for me to say – but he certainly has already had a real and tangible effect on me. Satantango showed me a way of writing about serious things seriously, in a way that wasn’t preachy or boringly ironical. It may well be bleak, but it is also terribly, awesomely, sincere. And sincerity never hurts the message.

For more doom and gloom, check out my reviews of Andrei Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories, or Varlam Shalamov’s time in the Gulag. If, on the other hand, you’re in need of some cheeriness and affirmation, my review of Zorba the Greek is here.

Photo of László Krasznahorkai by Lenke Szilágyi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions and (Less Strong) Arguments

One Big Misunderstanding

I recently finished Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions, a collection of the author’s interviews, essays, and letters-to-the-editor. Since the pieces were all short and written with some degree of accessibility in mind, it became my bedtime reading for a few days. The first thing of his that I read was “Lolita”, which stumbled through aged fourteen without understanding a word and thus thinking for most of it that Lo was having the time of her life.

Following that magnificent misunderstanding of Lolita, Nabokov’s interviews in isolation were what I read next. I was at an age and in an environment where I was wholly convinced of the sanctity of the Canon while at the same time not really able to say what exactly it was. I was open, in a sense, to an authoritarian or at the very least authoritative figure who seemingly knew what was what and wasn’t shy about letting me know. It’s probably for the same reason that Harold Bloom appealed at that point, even though I didn’t understand him either when I actually tried reading him. Nabokov in these sits on his great-writerly throne dispensing fireballs and lightning and very, very occasionally, a glimmer of praise.

Back then that all was very attractive – it gave me opinions so that I didn’t need to bother forming my own, and it told me what was worth reading so that I didn’t have to read either. But now, having read other writers’ (and critics’) essays, binged the back issues of the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction”, and done a little growing up, the book that had I read it six or seven years ago might have seemed the masterwork of an assured genius, now appears in a much less pleasant light.

Structure

As I mentioned above, the book is made of interviews, letters-to-the-editor, and a few essays. The former make up most of the book, and stretch from immediately after the publication of Lolita until Ada’s own completion. The letters meanwhile include such banalities as Nabokov’s witticisms on the moon landings. While Lolita, being the most popular and enduring of his novels, takes up the main part of the interviews even long after it has been published, the essays that end the book are concerned with another book of Nabokov’s – his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The collection, it is important to note here, is one organised by Nabokov during his own lifetime – each interview, for instance, is introduced by his comments explaining the circumstances of each meeting – and for that reason it’s fair also to say that these two works are what he considers to be his primary legacy, and indeed he says as much. I’ll tackle both the interviews and essays in turn.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Great Writer, sure. But here we’re after his personality.

The Interviews

These were on the whole pretty fun, and what I was here for. Though I had read a few before, I scarcely remembered them. It also doesn’t help that Nabokov repeats himself. He has a number of metaphors and images that he uses again and again for two reasons. The first of these is that as with the rest of us, the things that are at the forefront of his mind are often similar from year to year, even if his vocabulary is undoubtedly marvellous (I quite wanted to go through it again just noting down every new and exciting word of his), and so when they are stacked side by side these interviews become a little like paintings at an art gallery. What beauty and power they have individually becomes blurred and dulled by company of equals. The same is true of Nabokov’s metaphors.

The other problem, though, is that these aren’t interviews in the strictest sense. Nabokov admits in his preface that “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child” (was there ever a more blatant instance of praising with faint damning?) and so what he does instead of speak unprompted is get his questions in advance and prepare answers to them on flashcards. It means that the whole selection has a slightly odd feeling of unreality to it – this is obviously not who Nabokov actually is in speech, but nor is he entirely who he is in his fiction either. It has an uncomfortable artificiality to it.

The Interviews: Humour and Judgement

But they are fun, and by this term I mean that they appeal in a few different ways. One of those is that the interviews are actually pretty funny. I love the hilariously awful punning of things like “I differ from Joseph Conradically” or my personal favourite “Off the Nabocuff” – things that if I said them in person I would be met with a sigh and awkward smile but when written down Nabokov almost seems to get away with. Beyond the puns there is the casual tone, such as when he calls himself “the shuttlecock above the Atlantic”, or talks of the indifferent audience he has to face whenever he lectures. All this is simple and mindless, but things become a lot more complicated when the humour is derived from his judgements about others – and it is regarding his judgements of others that the centre of my distaste for the book lies.

I imagine at least a few people read this book to know what Nabokov thinks of other writers. It’s certainly why I read the interviews all those years ago, and it remains an almost unacknowledged reason for why I still read a lot of things by other writers, especially ones that I admire. I want the literary gossip – who’s in, and who’s out. Nabokov is very good at deciding who is passé and out of style. Conrad is obliterated whenever there is a chance – “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés” – and anybody who writes any fiction occupied by ideas is doomed to disdain. Hemingway is merely the author of “something about bells, balls, and bulls”, though Nabokov admits to liking “the wonderful fish story”. The authors of the Soviet period are also crushed by Nabokov’s own iron fist.

Praise is left for Joyce, Kafka, Borges, and Beckett, among others. But the greater part of the interviews are concerned with criticism of fellow writers, and here it goes hand in hand with witticism rather than analysis, much to its own discredit. Aside from comments about Conrad’s childishness and sentimentality there is very little explanation of why Nabokov didn’t actually like him. Meanwhile, when praise is given it is rarely a simple matter either: Nabokov’s desire to belittle Hemingway’s output is made clear through his language (and since he wrote everything for these conversations down beforehand, Nabokov’s language is absolutely worth a little close reading) – instead of naming The Old Man and the Sea or Fiesta, Nabokov refers to them by their topics, suggesting that their names were not good enough to remain in his memory. This is in contrast to somebody like Kafka, whose “Metamorphosis” (which Nabokov refers to as “The Transformation”, a little closer to the German “Verwandlung” original) is named, or Joyce’s Ulysses. Where praise comes, it is carefully and cunningly formulated so that Nabokov never seems to be praising outright anybody he wouldn’t consider to be his equal (thus Kafka and Joyce are worthy in his mind, whatever he may state in faux-humility elsewhere). We get little from reading these parts except for a list of literary friends and enemies.

Of course, perhaps you can say that it’s wrong to expect analysis from an interview – I’d grant that. But mere witticisms are far less helpful than even the pithiest of analytical comments.

The Interviews: the Nabokov Show

For those people interested in Nabokov himself, these interviews admittedly do contain a wealth of information. On his compositional methods: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule is flexible but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well-sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.” He includes a detailed description of his daily routine too, but for those who seek the secrets of success there is likely only disappointment: Nabokov spends a lot of time walking, drinking tea, and playing Russian Scrabble.

We also learn what he read as a child, and what has fallen in and out of fashion with him as he has aged: “Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok” are his childhood’s occupation, while “Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin” gain ascendency once he is into his twenties, thirties, and forties. We are told that Lolita only survived being incinerated after an intervention by his wife, Vera, and a little bit about his life in Berlin and France before he reached America. Biographical details, simply put, but nonetheless interesting if that is to your taste.

The Interviews: A Cutting Edge

Nabokov wrote, by common admission, pretty good fiction, and when he wants to in these interviews he can well deploy that power of insight which contributes a great deal towards his reputation, just rarely. It is here too, that his strong opinions are most useful, for they allow him to say boldly what others might not. He is at his most interesting when discussing themes also addressed in his novels and stories. When discussing how we view reality he imagines it in a series of steps: “reality is a very subjective affair… a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist”. He also talks about memory, the ways that the past changes as we grow older and begin to focus on different aspects of it – “The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is”. Less interesting is his dismissal of Soviet fiction in its entirety as mere banality – though much of it was, his answer lacks a lot of nuance and could conceal from a reader the value of what was produced in the Soviet Union in terms of writing. One thing I did agree with though was his statement about Osip Mandel’shtam, the Russian poet, whose death in the camps Nabokov states makes his poetry look better now than it would do otherwise, good as it is. This is close to my own experience of him too, but I’m keeping my mind open since I’ve not read as much as I’d have liked to.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), whose novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin details the tragically aimless life of its eponymous hero.

The Onegin Affair – Introduction and Background

The interviews at their best are a collection of witticisms and occasional insights into their author’s talent and creative process; at their worst they are rude an unfounded criticisms of others with nary an analysis in sight. The majority of the essays in the second half of the book deal with Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, and unfortunately they are much oftener similar to the bad interviews than to the good ones. Nabokov’s version of Pushkin’s novel in verse was first published in 1964, and included as an appendix a section on prosody differences between English and Russian – for both works (“Notes on Prosody” was published separately later) he met with fierce opposition, and responded equally fiercely. His own translation was written in accordance with his own views on the act of translation, expounded among the interviews and in the essays too. That view was one of extreme literalism. Nabokov wanted every word to be translated exactly according to its meaning, so that works translated from a foreign language ought to sound strange, precisely because they are not being adapted or smoothed over for their new audience. It makes them clunky but according to Nabokov also much more correct. It’s not a debate to get into here, but needless to say the style of his version of Pushkin’s work raised a few hackles among academia and the wider public.

The Onegin Affair – the Nature of the Defence

Nabokov, way back when, used to be good friends with the literary critic Edmund Wilson. During the course of the affair things between them got a little heated, and a sort of mangled retelling of all this is possible by looking through the essays and following up a few of the references within them. The key essay is the fourth one, “Reply to my Critics”, which is “a magazine article of explanation, retaliation, and protest” but mostly the latter two. Nabokov takes to task a huge number of minor denizens of the academy who have been critical of him, before rounding on Mr Wilson in particular. Wilson, in his own article, had begun by stating that he and Nabokov were old friends, but ones whose affection was “sometimes chilled by exasperation.” Nabokov, nonetheless, rounds on him. Where Wilson suggests he has “an addiction to rare and unfamiliar words” Nabokov arrogantly responds that “it does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey”. Elsewhere, he compares him to “some seventeenth-century pedant discoursing on high and low style”.

But beyond these criticisms of tone and personality, Nabokov also states that Wilson has no right to complain about his writing because Wilson is actually bad at Russian – which as a language learner is among the most offensive things you can be told. Nabokov acts in such a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation – he says himself that “my facts are objective and irrefutable” even as they are simply more and more opinions disguised as facts by a grandiose prose style. He is rude and, if not often wrong, then at least far less “right” than he seems to think he is. When Wilson tried to make things good again between them, saying that his article was “more damaging” than he had intended, Nabokov, instead of accepting the apology merely rubbed salt in the wounds by saying “his article, entirely consisting, as I have shown, of quibbles and blunders, can be damaging only to his own reputation”. In one of the letters-to-the-editor written later, Nabokov once more dismisses the possibility of making up with his old friend, writing “I am aware that my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honour the latter wins.” The very next year Wilson was dead.

This may all sound ridiculous. In a sense, after all, I’m just criticising Nabokov’s personality. But when we read interviews and essays, at least outside of an academic context, part of their appeal comes from the way they somehow contain the essence of their authors. Nabokov’s personality does not appeal to me – I would even go so far as to say that he should little appeal to anybody. He is cruel, insistently so, and arrogant beyond all measure. He may well have assembled this collection hoping to impress his readers, but anyone with unclouded vision will instead see whatever idol they’ve constructed for him crumble with each passing page. We rarely read fiction for the personality of a work’s creator (excepting, for example, the Beats) because the text is rarely so autobiographical that we cannot move beyond the author’s experience, if the work is good enough, into something exciting and more universal. But here Nabokov’s personality is overwhelming, and overwhelmingly toxic. Other essays just take aim at differing people who have annoyed him over the years, such as Robert Lowell and Maurice Girodias, and are just as tiresome.

Montreux in Switzerland, where Nabokov spent his later years.

Rays of Light

For that reason, the best parts of the book are where Nabokov is doing something similar to telling a story and his own person takes a back seat. One of the letters-to-the-editor recounts the death of his father shortly after the family had arrived in Berlin. At the end of the book Nabokov details some expeditions in search of rare butterflies. In both instances we can enjoy the texts as independent of the personality created them. Another time where the book takes a turn for the better, and for me the most frustrating moment, is in the article on the Russian poet Vladimir Hodasevich (Khodasevich). It is a rare incidence of praise, and the only essay here that he translated from the original Russian work he did before coming to America. It includes the line “even genius does not save one in Russia; in exile, one is saved by genius alone”, which sounds rather good if nothing else. But it is annoying because essays like this, where Nabokov turns your eyes towards writers you hadn’t considered or even heard of, are almost non-existent here. In one of the interviews he famously declares Andrei Bely’s Petersburg as one of the four great masterpieces of the 20th century, which almost singlehandedly brought about that book’s revival and appreciation in the West. But again, that’s two new authors after a whole book’s worth of vitriol.

Conclusion

It is not easy to do, by any stretch of the imagination, but once one tears oneself away from the fancy prose style and the enchantments of his undoubtedly beautiful and charming language, the book offers far less than perhaps might be expected, based on Nabokov’s colossal reputation. The revelations are few and far between, and not even the sparkling of nice words can disguise the insipid cruelty of which he gives every indication of being proud. We may read criticism to watch our literary temples be torn down as much as we want to see them be built up, but Nabokov rarely undermines the foundations of what he attacks – instead he simply slings mud and insults at them until the walls are stained brown, but ultimately left easy enough to wipe clean. Rarely do we learn why things are bad, only that Mr Nabokov thinks they are. We do get the odd bit of insight into Nabokov’s life and times, but that’s not enough to redeem the book. It is a failure underneath the prose.

If you are after analysis, take a look at his lectures or book on Gogol’. If you are after style and an entertaining story that is not dripping with nastiness, he wrote plenty of fiction to keep you busy. But this… this is just a disappointment. Better to stay away.

For Nabokov in a much more enjoyable guise, I have a piece on Pnin, over here.

Picture of Vladimir Nabokov by Walter Mori (Mondadori Publishers) is in the public domain.

Portrait of Alexander Pushkin is by Orest Kiprensky and in the public domain

Photo of Montreux is by Nserrano and used under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)