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Indlæser... Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov's Puzzles, Codes, Signs and Symbolsaf John Banville
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The Anatomy collects more than thirty mostly short essays or reflections on Signs and Symbols, some previously published, some written especially for this volume. Signs and Symbols appears in its brief entirety. The title metaphor of an 'anatomy' is carried through the book, with essays collected in sections labelled 'nervous system', 'muscles', DNA and so on. The connection between the essays and their section headings is rarely apparent. The overall impression of the collection is one of a general sameness of tone, style and content with a great deal of repetition. If you read the collection in its entirety, and I abandoned only a few of the essays, the repeated summaries of Signs and Symbols will inscribe the story forever in some fold of your brain. Quite a few of the essays are tedious and one or two seemed to me quite mad. But there are wonderfully illuminating contributions from William Carroll, Paul Rozenzweig, Joanna Trzeciak, John Hagopian, among others, and a fascinating correspondence between Nabokov and the editorial department of the New Yorker, where Signs and Symbols was first published in 1948. It is quite evident that the New Yorker editorial staff knew that they were in to something when they agreed to publish the story, but didn't have much idea just what it was that they were on to. That was my impression, too, when I read Signs and Symbols for the first time. Though there is much repetition of content, some tedious disputation and occasional wild forays into unintelligibility, the Anatomy does convince that Signs and Symbols is an unexhaustible subject for reflection and central to an understanding of Nabokov, whose own strange life becomes increasingly central to an understanding of his books. If you want to re-visit Nabokov territory, read the studies in Banville's Anatomy with rests between for Andrea Pitzer's wonderful Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov and Nabokov's own Pnin, which emerges as a far more significant book than it seemed when it was first published.
One thing more. If you are not familiar with the way a US telephone dial looked in 1948, do a Google Image search. I'm not convinced by the numerological excursions of some of Banville's essayists, but it does help to have a visual image of the telephone, which is so central a mechanism in the story. ( )