How accurate is this? Why shouldn't I jump to Ada?

just pick one it doesn't matter

>>9580664
Oh no, you don't want to do that. We don't know what could happen.

i'd rather understand the progression of nabokov's style as opposed to jumping from pale fire back to the defense

Just jump to Ada. A lot of Nabokov is unnecessary in my opinion.

The gift is a boring turn of the century novel which thematically deals with his aestheticism and is interesting as a sort of portrait of the artist as a young man, invitation of a beheading (maybe because of the translation) seems just a clumsy purple prose-y novel--everything is described painstakingly in minute details, incredibly annoying and at times it seems facile.

Lolita, Pnin, and Ada on the otherhand are mature masterpieces.

Bolano said in 2666 that we have forgot the art of wrestling with an authors big books, and now we retreat in his smaller ones. We avoid the magic mountain to read death in venice, we avoid moby dick to read bartleby. I believe especially for Nabokov this should be avoided.

my uncle tried jumping straight into ada, without so much as even reading lolita prior. no one's heard from him since. stay safe op and please be reasonable.

>>9581900
#PrayForAnonsUncle

>>9581900
Try holding the book open upside down and shaking it.

>>9581900
I would jump straight into Ada to be quite honest

>>9580664

>no bend sinister

>>9581885
We do? Im pretty sure the people on this website read more difficult books even when they have no idea what the book is really doing. Bolano sounds like an fool

>>9580664
Because Lolita, Pale Fire, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, Pnin and The Gift are all better than Ada.

File: bolano.png (172KB, 617x359px) Image search: [Google]

172KB, 617x359px

>>9581997
Bolaño's point wasn't that we read Moby-Dick less than Bartleby, but rather that the 20th century saw an increase in praise for neat, short, self-contained novels, as opposed to the ambitious --perhaps even overzealous-- tomes that take on a vitality of their own.
"What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."
Bolaño also wasn't interested in the reading habits of cocky twenty-year-olds.

>>9582231
oh ya well a reviewer in the nytimes said there were parts of 2666 that dragged

>>9582241
There is pages and pages of women getting killed, a lot of my more bougie friends found that part off-putting. I thought the whole book was amazing art.

>>9582231
Thanks for this summary and re-posting, anon. I've definitely found myself exhibiting these behaviors, some of which stem from superficial reading challenges like Goodreads'. I'm enjoying and slogging through W&P, but I also find myself wanting to take a break so I can just finish a quick masterpiece like Kreutzer Sonata. It's worth it to endure the true 'battles' and finish the epics everytime, however.

>>9582231
>Bolaño's point wasn't that we read Moby-Dick less than Bartleby, but rather that the 20th century saw an increase in praise for neat, short, self-contained novels, as opposed to the ambitious --perhaps even overzealous-- tomes that take on a vitality of their own.

And yet, nowadays all the so-called "ambitious tomes", hundreds of pages long, are rather trite and the result of overachievers who feel the need to write that one Big Novel, not because they want to or the work itself demands it, but because they have this idea that a good novelist must write very long novels, not because he is good, but because he is a novelist, and if he writes a long novel then he will become good. A good example of that is Franzen.

I know that Bolaño is dealing with readers there, but I still think that writers tend to follow that way of thinking but in an egotistical manner,

>>9582231
Okay, I see what he's saying, I stand corrected. You see this all the time actually, the later and more risky novels of the greats are often appended with statements like indulgence or bloat.