Where to begin? How to tell her that the author she so admired would have sneered at her praise? Here, again, is Nabokov from that 1962 BBC interview: "Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions." Nafisi, at least when she was living in Tehran, was in need of a great deal more than riddles with elegant solutions. I don't think Nabokov would have cared much about what she needed. "I don't give a damn for the group," he told Playboy magazine in 1964, "the community, the masses, and so forth ... there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art." And: "I have neither the intent nor the temperament to be a moralist or satirist." Mediocrity, he thought, "thrives on ideas." By which, he told Time magazine in 1969, he meant "general ideas, the big, sincere ideas which permeate a so-called great novel, and which, in the inevitable long run, amount to bloated topicalities stranded like dead whales." This is the nicest way I can think of to tell Nafisi that Nabokov didn't give a damn about anything -- politics, feminism, humanism -- that she does, at least not in any of his fiction.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:23 AM  |