Apart from Lolita he isn't that good t-b-h.
>he hasn't read pale fire
>>8251071
Ada is one of the great literary works of the 20th century and Pale Fire is superb. His lesser other works alone would still put him on the same level as any other respected writer of his era.i know you're just bantering tho
>>8251073
Or Ada.
>>8251073
Pale Fire may be his best.
>>8251071
Like everyone else has said, pale fire and ada are both great (not as good as Lolita, but still great). His Russian books are also very good. What have you read by him OP?
>>8251071
The Defense, Glory, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, Pale Fire, Pnin, Ada, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (I've never warmed up to Bend Sinister, although it is good).
lolita is arguably not even his top 5
>>8251957
I think Ada was a sprawling, self-indulgent display of genius, whereas Lolita was relatively compressed and refined.
It's like Finnegans Wake vs. Ulysses.
With only four or five exceptions out of his whole oevre, the only people who say that Nabokov's books aren't good seem to be those that haven't read them. In other words, if you had read more than just Lolita, you wouldn't have said this. Embarassing, 2/10 bait.
>>8252085
I'd like to see you argue that.
>>8252106
invitation to a beheading
ada
pale fire
the gift
and then lolita/the defense/pnin/bend sinister and possibly a couple others are all of comparable quality.
>>8252116
This is what constitutes an argument in your mind?
>>8252272
im not going to write a dissertation on /lit/ justifying aesthetic rankings
the only one of the four i ranked above lolita that could see debate is the gift, anyway. other 3 are pretty widely accepted.
>>8252116
Interesting that you put Invitation to a Beheading at the top. I really enjoyed it but it was certainly less ambitious than some of his other work. Though I think it did some things well, it didn't even attempt to do as much as Lolita succeeds in doing.
Also: Could you explain why you rank Pnin equally with Lolita? I thought it was pretty lackluster by his standards.
Laughter in the Dark anybody?
>>8251071
>not being an autistic chess player and studying nabokov's chess problems
>>8252308
let's assume for a moment that authorial judgment carries non trivial weight-
nabokov himself considered invitiation his finest work (he made this comment after lolita, but before pale fire/ada were published/writte).
he also considers pnin to be a "mirror" of lolita, which naturally invites comparison.
whereas lolita demonstrates all the seductivity of language and contains the usual nabokovian bombast and virtuosity, pnin manages to illustrate the flip side of the coin (there's a lot of literature out there on pnin v. humbert) in a subdued but still powerful manner. pnin is a favorite among academics (perhaps due to subject matter) for one, and the "secret" plot of wwii/holocaust/soviet union makes it memorable as the most political of nabokov's novels. i would argue it's no less ambitious than lolita, but in a much more subtle manner.
