Volume 18, Number 3 · February 24, 1972
Genesis
By V.S. Pritchett
Glory
by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dimitri Nabokov. in collaboration with the author
McGraw-Hill, 205 pp., $6.95
The Scorpion God
by William Golding
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 178 pp., $5.95
The early Nabokov novels, written during the late Twenties and Thirties and published in the Russian émigré journals at the time, are now being carefully translated with the expected minute care by the master and his son. Glory has the prickly worded yet nonchalant detachment of the best young European writing of that period; one can think at once of half a dozen novels of that time, excellent in themselves, but vulgarly knocked out by fashion and history. Henry Green, for example, or the early Anthony Powell. It was a genre standoffish to outsiders, affectionately malicious to those within small, happy circles. For a decade or two the artist was to know himself as an exile and not a journalistic joiner, and, to exiles, language and a few friends are the sacred country. The dictionary is the one holy book; as in another exile-creating period, there will be a turn to Stendhal's requirement of 'exact chemistry' in the description of places, feeling, and people. This rejuvenates a stale world.
Review, 1797 words
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