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Contemporary Fiction Views: It's only words [1]
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Date: 2022-12-27
The Tower of Babel by Alexander Mikhalchyk, via Wikimedia Commons
The focus of this weekly column is on contemporary literary fiction. As someone who is not a genre snob, I have found complex storytelling and delicate wordplay in novels in other genres. One of my literary touchstones is E.M. Forster's statement from Howards End to "only connect ... live in fragments no longer".
So when I found connections between a current historical fantasy and Nabokov, well, I want to tell you all about it.
Nabokov published his memoir, Speak, Memory, in 1951. It includes several individual essays about his life. The most audacious one is by a fictional reviewer of the memoir itself. Although it was not published with the original memoir, it was included as an appendix in a new volume. The essay itself was first published in 1998. While clearing out old editions of The New Yorker, I had to see it again. And again, I'm floored.
As a reviewer who does not exist, Nabovkov has a strong opinion of the reptalian aspects of the memoir.
The diamond pattern of art and the muscles of sinuous memory are combined in one strong and supple movement and produce a style that seems to slip through grass and flowers toward the warm flat stone upon which it will richly coil.
Sounds like a reference to untrustworthiness. Hmm, how appropriate considering the piece of writing in which it is included.
Nothing about this writing is accidental, as the reviewer notes:
One cannot but respect the amount of retrospective acumen and creative concentration that the author had to summon in order to plan his book according to the way his life had been planned by unknown players of games, and never to swerve from that plan.
There is certainly a lot of planning in Nabokov's writing.
The chapter includes comparisons between Nabokov's memoir, titled Conclusive Evidence at the time, and When Lilacs Last, a fictional memoir by a writer Nabokov created, Barbara Braun. The fictional Braun is supposed to be New England aristocracy, firmly rooted in the WASP traditions. That non-existent memoir is compared to Nabokov's, with the created reviewer seeming to think the Braun work will last longer than the one written by his creator. I don't have the scholarship to know whether he intended Braun's last name to recall a certain wife of a certain dictator. I do wonder if that was possible, especially considering how Nabokov the fictional reviewer discusses fascism and Russian politics pre-Communist era.
While it may be possible to get lost in unraveling those connections, and parsing how convoluted the tussles Nabokov had with fact-checkers and editors at The New Yorker, which also are covered in this "review", one sentence stood out now that made this rediscovery worthwhile. In opening a section on Nabokov's writing in a language he didn't grow up with, Nabokov's created reviewer states:
How do we learn the great secret wrapped in words?
How indeed? Is it even completely possible? Whether it is achieved or not, the wonder and glory in making discoveries within words are among the greatest joys in reading. And they are a core part of a current novel that I have been enjoying immensely.
Babel, by R.F. Kuang, is a historical fantasy in which there is a Tower of Babel on Oxford's storied campus. Translators from around the world are brought there to study and work. The most talented are charged with inscribing powerful word spells on bars of silver. For in this world, silver is powerful. It makes things run smoothly, creates beauty and is treasured by rich and poor. It has made England the most important country in the world, controlling vast treasure and multitudes of people. There is an underground movement to distribute that power more equitably. Or is there?
Within the framework of this adventure, there is the knowledge that words are what makes silver power, and that words are to be treasured for themselves. When being introduced to Babel, our hero, Robin Swift, and his new univeristy friend are told about the various departments within the structure (which, like the Tardis, is larger on the inside). The Literature Department
.. could be the most dangerous scholars of them all, because they're the ones who really understand languages -- know how they live and breathe and how they can make our blood pump, or our skin prickle, with just a turn of phrase. But they're too obsessed fiddling with their lovely images to bother with how all that living energy might be channelled into something far more powerful. I mean, of course, silver.
That poor fellow. All that knowledge and he doesn't realize that the words themselves are the treasure, for what they mean and bring to the human spirit. That realization is something that underpins this novel, and makes it even greater than a rompish adventure into a magical world.
And, although I don't always grasp everything he's writing about, this is an idea that I like to think Nabokov would approve.
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