excerpts

Nabokov’s novella The Enchanter is a precursor of sorts to Lolita, but it really does inhabit an immensely foggier area between literature and soft-core pornography than the latter work. Although the basic idea of marrying the nymphet’s mother to gain access to her stays much the same between both books, by the time Nabokov came to write Lolita (The Enchanter was written years before that in Russian and translated only recently into English by his son) “the thing was new and had grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel” – as he puts it so inimitably in the preface.

Basically, I recommend The Enchanter if you:
(a) are a Nabokov junkie; and/or
(b) are a paedophile

Here are some sample passages. The first one’s from page 4, no less. He certainly wastes no time in getting to the point:

“What if the way to true bliss is indeed through a still delicate membrane, before it has had time to harden, become overgrown, lose the fragrance and the shimmer through which one penetrates to the throbbing star of that bliss? Even within these limitations I proceed with a refined selectivity; I’m not attracted to every schoolgirl that comes along, far from it – how many one sees, on a gray morning street, that are husky, or skinny, or have a necklace of pimples or wear spectacles – those kinds interest me as little, in the amorous sense, as a lumpy female acquaintance might interest someone else. In any case, independently of any special sensations, I feel at home with children in general, in all simplicity; I know that I would be a most loving father in the common sense of the word, and to this day cannot decide whether this is a natural complement or a demonic contradiction.”

The next two are considerably more ewww-worthy. After his wife’s sudden death, the protagonist is on a train to her friend’s house, where her daughter had been staying during her illness. He is now the little girl’s guardian.

“Luxuriating in the concentrated rays of an internal sun, he pondered the delicious alliance between premeditation and pure chance, the Edenic discoveries that awaited her, the way the amusing traits peculiar to bodies of different sex, seen at close range, would appear extraordinary yet natural and homey to her, while the subtle distinctions of intricately refined passion would long remain for her but the alphabet of innocent caresses: she would be entertained only with storybook images (the pet giant, the fairy-tale forest, the sack with its treasure), and with the amusing consequences that would ensue when she inquisitively fingered the toy with the familiar but never tedious trick.

…

Thus they would live on – laughing, reading books, marveling at gilded fireflies, talking of the flowering walled prison of the world, and he would tell her tales and she would listen, his little Cordelia, and nearby the sea would breathe beneath the moon….And exceedingly slowly, at first with all the sensitivity of his lips, then in earnest, with all their weight, ever deeper, only thus – for the first time – into your inflamed heart, thus, forcing my way, thus, plunging into it, between its melting edges…

The lady who had been sitting across from him for some reason suddenly got up and went into another compartment; he glanced at the blank face of his wristwatch – it wouldn’t be long now – and then he was already ascending next to a white wall crowned with blinding shards of glass as a multitude of swallows flew overhead.”

The thing is, even at his worst, Nabokov’s prose in other parts of this book is still head and shoulders over almost anything else I read. I would like to deny The Enchanter the status of “literature” (yes, I realize that word contains multitudes but let’s just use it in its most narrow-minded traditional sense for these purposes, mmmmkay?), but I can’t. Nabokov junkies should read this, because I’m pretty sure it still has a lot of what you like about him. People who have never read Nabokov should not start with this, but buy Lolita pronto. I’m not qualified to advise the paedophiles.

I first read Jane Eyre when I was eight. I never thought I appreciated it on a level higher than that of a trashy romance novel, but rereading it this past week seems to suggest it may have influenced me in ways I wasn’t aware of at the time. In teenage years I developed (and still hold to) characteristics and views extraordinarily similar to hers, but I certainly never consciously sought to emulate her.

On the self:

“I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give”…”Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.”

On hating how most of your fellow females talk to men:

“Surely she cannot truly like him, or not like him with true affection! If she did, she need not coin her smiles so lavishly, flash her glances so unremittingly, manufacture airs so elaborate, graces so multitudinous. It seems to me that she might, by merely sitting quietly at his side, saying little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it – to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace…”

On how to address the man you are completely in love with, after being separated from him for ages, and meeting again to find him blind, crippled and morose:

“Have you a pocket-comb about you, sir?”
“What for, Jane?”
“Just to comb out this shaggy black mane. I find you rather alarming, when I examine you close at hand: you talk of my being a fairy, but I am sure, you are more like a brownie.”
“Am I hideous, Jane?”
“Very, sir: you always were, you know.”

Jane rocks.

“Cinoc, who was then about fifty, pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a “word-killer”: he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse.

When he retired in nineteen sixty-five, after fifty-three years of scrupulous service, he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nick-names, weights and measures; he had wiped dozens of islands, hundreds of cities and rivers, and thousands of townships off the map; he had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects, and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had been swept by his hand into eternal obscurity.”

[This seems to be the antithesis of what Perec’s trying to accomplish in this book. He’s trying to document the minutiae, to impress upon the reader that behind everything and everyone in this random Paris apartment block among countless others there is a story to be told and a context to be appreciated, richness beneath apparent mundanities.]

But pretentious literary analysis aside, I was thinking about how much I would hate to be a word-killer. The notion of making a living out of the fall of entities depresses me immensely – to do a proper job you would first have to become familiar with their genesis, their emerging into common parlance, then stagnation, then obsolescence. And after all this your job wouldn’t be to document lives but to cement over them.