Birth as Metamorphosis

Via Andrew Sullivan (“Death as Metamorphosis”), a previously unpublished interview in which John Updike talks about death in Vladimir Nabokov’s writing and says, “I take dying to be for a lepidopterist like him a kind of entry into immortality, just the way a butterfly on its pin becomes deathless, in a sense, and is preserved.”

I’m not sure whether the reassurance that Updike found in a lepidopterist’s metamorphic rather than terminal vision of death has much of a real basis in Nabokov’s work, but I’ve always found a very different kind of comfort regarding mortality in the writing of the Russian master, especially in this passage from the opening of Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence... But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

The first time I read this, I realized I’d never feared “the prenatal abyss” in the same way I instinctively dreaded the possibility of permanent extinction after this life. If there is a God, I thought, then the Creator who cared enough to bring me into being out of an eternal and untroubled preexistence might have something equally benign and purposeful in store after I’m dead. And it is Nabokov’s smiling imaginative eloquence, rather than the Gothic spookiness of that empty baby carriage, that has stayed with me.

Forgotten Cold War Thrillers

At Five Books, the Stockholm-based spy novelist Jeremey Duns offers a fascinating survey of some compelling thrillers from the Cold War era, including Yulian Semyonov’s Seventeen Moments of Spring, a Russian genre classic featuring the exploits of Maksim Esaev, a Soviet rival to James Bond; and Noel Behn's “unbelievably bleak” The Kremlin Letter, which was adapted into a 1970 film directed by John Huston, with a cast that included Orson Welles and Max von Sydow.

Ill Said

Over at The Millions site, Garth Risk Hallberg administers a comprehensive whipping of criticism's most notorious pleasure-killing machine, B.R. Myers, author of A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American LIterary Culture and The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. Myers may be a skilled interpreter of North Korean political culture, but he’s a one-man North Korea of literary sensibility. His primary bête noire is anything he deems postmodernist, and he beats on it like Camille Paglia humping a Madonna mannequin. You can discern both the style of his wooden invidiousness and the substance of his captious manifesto in a sample sentence like this one: “I would also rather join the reactionaries than those who want to reduce the printed sentence to an elongated Rorschach blot.” The only thing I regret about Hallberg’s counterstrike is his pinning it largely on a defense of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom against the perfidy of Myers’ recent review in the Atlantic; you don’t have to love the Franzen to have the Myers make your skin crawl. It's not really about the targets that Myers chooses (Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLilo, Denis Johnson, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer), the narrow shelf of writers he's admired (John le Carré, and no one else I can recall at the moment), or the crabbed virtues he dimly champions. His disapprobation and praise amount to the same thing, a vivid instance of the malady that Samuel Johnson called “the general conspiracy against contemporary merit.”

Photograph of B.R. Myers courtesy of Seoul Rotary Club