Four chapters of the book – more than half its length – were published as individual stories in The New Yorker, and Nabokov – astonishing to think of it – had trouble placing it with publishers, who considered a mere “collection of sketches”. (Next, in 1962, would come Pale Fire, the only Nabokov I’ve read which comes close to Lolita.) The first question to consider is whether it’s a novel at all. Pnin was published two years after Lolita, in 1957. That’s going too far, but it led me to concentrate on his few post- Lolita novels when exploring him further. Lolita outshines anything else I’ve read by him, until finally I decided (via the likes of Despair, Laughter in the Dark, and King, Queen, Knave) that anything pre- Lolita was an apprentice work unworthy of consideration. Often, to me – say, with Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller or Evelyn Waugh – it’s the wrong book which is best known. Many writers have one book which is much better known than anything else they have written, and which overshadows all their other work.
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