I finished Nabokov’s “Pale Horse.” It is one of those books that is in those various lists of the top ten list of best novels ever, along with James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” “The Brothers Karamazov” “Lolita”, also by N, and all the others. What is so incredible is that the novel starts with a 400 line poem in perfect iambic pentameter in mostly rhyming couplets, and then the rest of the novel is revealed in commentary on the poem, line by line. It was too cumbersome for me to keep referring back to the verse, so I didn’t, and then when the commentary was done, there were a few pages of wrapping up. I got the surprise at the first opportunity, I think, which was only in the last 10% of the book. It’s one of those novels that, as I’m reading, I know that I could never write that way, and if I did, it likely wouldn’t do well because it is hard reading with so many words that were foreign and required looking up, words that I would have never know, probably should haven’t known so esoteric many of them seemed to be, words that interrupted the sentence with a what the fuck’s that? Still, the sentences were beautiful and at the end I was just completely intimidated, feeling inadequate and thinking why am I even trying when there is so much genius already that I’ll never even get close to, and any attempt to do so likely to be met only by failure and frustration in my Icarial quest of pursuing the sun, except that I wouldn’t even get close and would fail and fall not from approaching genius but by tiring out and failing in any attempt to do so.
I better shake this off in a hurry, this defeatist thinking. I am back at it, in a way, Nabokov holding me back with the pull of his words and the time required for their digestion. I started a Kindle Unlimited Booker Prize novel now, “Milkman.” It’s interesting in that it’s first person and I can tell that it’s “cutting edge” stuff as it’s a little hard to read and not a typical style like all the other pulp fiction that you can speed read and not miss much of anything–must be why it won the prize. My writing isn’t like that. It’s fairly traditional, easier to read, I think.
Nabokov is clearly a genius who has memorized the English Language dictionary. What’s amazing is that English is not his native language, but perhaps that’s some particular advantage to writing in the way that he does. I queried ChatGPT to write a 100 word poem in iambic pentameter in rhyming couplets. I watched the words appear about as fast as I cold type. Too bad Nabokov didn’t have that little tool.