Nabokov and the Real World

"This book collects book includes eleven pieces about Vladimir Nabokov. A common thread connects the articles, which is an underlying sense that Nabokov's fiction resonantly addresses the realm beyond literature that we call, perhaps for want of a better term-and it is a word toward which he himself was dismissive-reality. . . . Nabokov was an existentially serious writer in the midst of being a playful one. He cared deeply about human relationships and their potential distortions, about love and the pain it often entails, and about what was happening in the larger historical theater. He firmly resisted attachment to political parties and trends. Yet he was acutely sensitive to the ways in which political ideologies could pervert or destroy human values and powerfully registered this awareness in several of his novels. His fiction poignantly conveys the burden of loss with which many must live-the loss of loved ones, of moral certainties, of homeland, of language and familiar cultural setting. In what the author has written on Nabokov, he has sought to give this large dimension of Nabokov's novels and stories more attention than it has often received"--