fieldus

What Nabokov said about Chekhov, quoted with salience and commitment by the Chicago-based Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon in the course of an interview published on the Other Voices website.

Some interesting things to say about ‘imperial fiction’ - he’s not a big fan of Ian McEwan. Not having read McEwan since ENDURING LOVE, I’m not in a good position to judge. CHESIL BEACH didn’t sound overly ambitious or monumental, though. Despite the imperial label, he still admires Bellow and Nabokov ardently.

He proposes a sentence writing course for those interested in the descriptive mode of writing fiction (he contrasts this with the confessional mode)

where paying attention to language suggests artifice, and artifice prevents truthfulness, so it’s rattling and rambling with lazy syntax and punctuation and where tag-words like “you know,” “I guess,” “you guys” suggests sincerity.

He dislikes sloppiness so much that he proposes the foundation of a sentence writing course:

I taught a course for writing students, “Reading Russian Writers”—because many of them had not read many foreign writers. We spent an hour and a half on a paragraph in Lolita. The point was not to get them to love it, but to isolate it. It’s the one that describes the death of his mother: “Picnic, lightning.” So beautiful. We paused on the paragraph—syntactical analysis and everything…

Doesn’t like a bad idea.

Interesting man.