Introduction and Breath

Jerry Friedman · 14 Apr 2011, 04:07 · from 2011-April.txt.gz

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From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:07:17 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Introduction and Breath
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From: Allan Anderson <rubel at goosemoon.org>
...

>I haven't really thought about Nabakov in a critical fashion, so perhaps that's 

>why little occurs to me when comparing him to Wolfe. What's an interesting place 
>
>to start? The way they present their narrators?

Here's my post at NABOKV-L recommending Wolfe to the people there:

http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0212&L=nabokv-l&P=R9842

Here's one by another person:

http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0504&L=nabokv-l&P=626

Let me also quote a letter Nabokov wrote to Katharine White at the New  Yorker, 
who had rejected his story "The Vane Sisters" (which is on a  rather Wolfean 
theme):

"Most of the stories I am contemplating (and some I have written in the  
past--you actually published one with such an 'inside'--the one about  the old 
Jewish couple and their sick boy) will be composed on these  lines, according to 
this system wherein a second (main) story is woven  into, or placed behind, the 
superficial semitransparent story."

It's not Nabokov's best sentence, but it sounds distinctly like Wolfe's system  
to me.  At least a lot of people here read Wolfe that way.

(By the way, I recommend that story about the old Jewish couple, "Signs  and 
Symbols"--though over 60 years later, there's no consensus on the  
interpretation.)

Jerry Friedman
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