Lazy Hyperbole Wednesday Thursday

[evelyn_b]

I'm about a million years behind on books I was meaning to read this week, so there is not much to report. I've just barely started A Man of the People and The Luzhin Defense. The latter has this anecdote in the author's introduction:

True, there was a promising flurry in the late thirties when an American publisher showed interest in it, but he turned out to belong to the type of publisher who dreams of becoming a male muse to his author, and our brief conjunction ended abruptly upon his suggesting I replace chess by music and make Luzhin a demented violinist.

When I first read Lolita in my wide-eyed youth, I took Nabokov totally at his word about the publisher who wanted to turn Lo and Humbert into a gaunt boy and gruff farmhand on a blanched prairie landscape with splintery barn in the corner; now I'm beginning to suspect he takes off-hand remarks and embroiders them for laughs, or just makes these American publishers out of whole cloth.

Anyway, Luzhin is not a demented violinist, but a friendless boy who becomes obsessed with chess.

There are some other books in the vicinity, but I'll get to them later, I hope.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

now I'm beginning to suspect he takes off-hand remarks and embroiders them for laughs, or just makes these American publishers out of whole cloth.

Well, it makes for a fun introduction, right? :-)

[evelyn_b]

It certainly does! The hypothetical "realistic" dialogue of those proposed farmhands ("He acts crazy. I guess we all act crazy sometimes. I guess God acts crazy") has stuck in my mind longer than most things. I don't blame him for it; it's just his style. But somewhere there is a perfectly good publisher who made a perfectly reasonable offhand suggestion one time, feeling indignant.

[thisbluespirit]

But somewhere there is a perfectly good publisher who made a perfectly reasonable offhand suggestion one time, feeling indignant.

At this date, probably not any longer!

[evelyn_b]

Hah, fair enough. I always forget about time and mortality!

[(Anonymous)]

The American Publishers are as real as the Vassar lady who wrote to Ray Bradbury asking him to rewrite his books to include women.

[evelyn_b]

In retrospect, I should have realized that sooner! But the Misguided American Publisher of Nabokov was like the Santa Claus of my young adulthood. I wanted to believe.