Style Is Matter - by Leland de la Durantaye (Hardcover)

About the Book

"How should we read Lolita? The beginning of an answer is that we should read it the way all great works deserve to be read: with attention and intelligence. But what sort of attention should we pay and what sort of intelligence should we apply to a...

Book Synopsis

"How should we read Lolita? The beginning of an answer is that we should read it the way all great works deserve to be read: with attention and intelligence. But what sort of attention should we pay and what sort of intelligence should we apply to a work of art that recounts so much love, so much loss, so much thoughtlessness--and across which flashes something we might be tempted to call evil? To begin with, we should read with the attention and intelligence we call empathy. A point on which all readers can agree is that great literature offers us a lesson in empathy: it encourages us to feel with the strange and the familiar, the strong and the weak, the vulgar and the cultivated, the young and the old, the lover and the beloved. It urges us to see our own fates as connected to those of others, to link the starry sky we see above us with whatever moral laws we might sense within."--from Style is Matter"Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade--demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out."--Vladimir Nabokov, Strong OpinionsWith this quote Leland de la Durantaye launches his elegant and incisive exploration of the ethics of art in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. Focusing on Lolita but also addressing other major works (especially Speak, Memory and Pale Fire), the author asks whether the work of this writer whom many find cruel contains a moral message and, if so, why that message is so artfully concealed. Style is Matter places Nabokov's work once and for all into dialogue with some of the most basic issues concerning the ethics of writing and of reading itself.De la Durantaye argues that Humbert's narrative confession artfully seduces the reader into complicity with his dark fantasies and even darker acts until the very end, where he expresses his bitter regret for what he has done. In this sense, Lolita becomes a study in the danger of art, the artist's responsibility to the real world, and the perils and pitfalls of reading itself. In addition to Nabokov's fictions, de la Durantaye also draws on his nonfiction writings to explore Nabokov's belief that all genuine art is deceptive--as is nature itself. Through de la Durantaye's deft and compelling writing, we see that Nabokov learned valuable lessons in mimicry and camouflage from the intricate patterns of the butterflies he adored.

Review Quotes

Style is Matter is beautifully written, and it is a pleasure to read. While Leland de la Durantaye expresses a sufficient number of 'strong opinions' of his own that are likely to provoke debate, he has done a fine job of outlining how Nabokov's art works, and why it resists facile interpretation. This book will serve as a useful reference point for future discussions of Lolita and Nabokov's work as a whole.

The centerpiece of this erudite, philosophically sophisticated study is Nabokov's Lolita--most particularly, the moral issues intrinsic to its subject and structure and the hotly debated questions to which they give rise. In an effort to solve the 'riddle' of how to read this controversial novel, Durantaye also discusses relevant aspects of numerous other works of Nabokov's fiction, from his earliest Russian novel, Mary, to the last one he completed in English, Look at the Harlequins! Cutting a broad swath through Nabokov's oeuvre, the author at the same time digs deep, paying as much, if not more, attention to Nabokov's statements and opinions about art-culled from the author's abundant letters, interviews, essays, lectures, scholarly studies, and translation projects-as he does to the verbal texture, or style, of a specific novel, Lolita included.

The focal point of Durantaye's graceful and thoughtful book is Lolita, in particular the ambivalence--the uneasy mixture of empathy and antipathy--that most readers and critics feel toward the novel's hero and narrator, Humbert Humbert. At once seducing readers through his rhetorical skill and repelling them through his vile behavior, Humbert raises in especially acute form the question of the interrelationship in Lolita of the aesthetic and the moral--a matter that has exercised Nabokov's best critics, and not only of Lolita. Therefore, while using Lolita as a starting point and a touchstone, de la Durantaye looks to the whole body of Nabokov's writing.

About the Author

Leland de la Durantaye is Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. He has written for the Boston Globe, Harvard Review, Rain Taxi, Bookforum, and the Village Voice.