by Kelly Pickerill

This is book nerddom at its finest. I fell in love with Vladimir Nabokov after reading Lolita in college (no chuckles, now). Humbert Humbert’s perversion notwithstanding, Nabokov’s prose is like a kick in the head for me — when I read a single sentence by him I want to throw the book down and write something myself. Though I lack the discipline required of a writer, the best books — those that come closest to making me feel writing isn’t so much a discipline as it is a tapping into the essence of lyricism, with the perfect balance of playfulness and reverence, make me want to write so bad. And everything I’ve read by Nabokov does. After Lolita I read Laughter in the Dark (or Camera Obscura), then Despair, then Pnin, Ada, and when The Original of Laura — Nabokov’s last, incomplete novel, written on 138 index cards — came out last year in a really amazing format designed by Chip Kidd, I snatched it up. Though I am too rigidly pro first edition to punch out the perforated reproduced index cards, the way the book was put together really is delightful.

So someone came up to the desk the other day to get a copy, and along with The Original of Laura they had a book called The Ada Poems by Cynthia Zarin. It had to be more than a coincidence, I thought, and sure enough: Zarin used as the inspiration for her fifth book of poetry Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor. It may be my adoration of T. S. Eliot’s poetry that makes me sympathetic to the idea of structuralism, but I think most artists whether they be novelists, poets, painters, are going to agree that the role of tradition, respecting the work that came before theirs and making use of it, is important. In an obvious way, Zarin’s poems brought me back to the experience of reading Nabokov, though not just because the voice of many of her poems was that precocious character, Ada. It was more that her words, their playfulness and precision, reminded me of Nabokov’s. I’m really enjoying reading these poems, and I’ll likely go back and read her earlier collections, as well.

For more on Nabokov read Lisa’s blog on The Original of Laura here.

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