The Humour of Vladimir Nabokov - by Paul Benedict Grant (Paperback)

About the Book

The first in-depth study of Vladimir Nabokov's humour, investigating its physical aspects such as farce, slapstick, sexual and scatological humour

Book Synopsis

Many critics classify Vladimir Nabokov as a highbrow humourist, a refined wordsmith overly fond of playful puzzles and private in-jokes whose art appeals primarily to an intellectually-sophisticated readership. This study presents a more balanced portrait, placing equal emphasis on the broader, earthier humour that is such a marked feature of Nabokov's writing, which draws on the human body and all things physical for its laughs: sex and scatology, farce and slapstick. Moving between the metaphysical and the physical, the cosmic and the comic, mind and matter, it presents Nabokov as a writer at home in both high and low forms of humour, a comedian who is capable of producing as many belly laughs as brainteasers, and of appealing to a much wider readership than is commonly supposed.

Review Quotes

This is a careful, thorough, and lively work, offering a fresh perspective on Nabokov's oeuvre. This study will surely be of interest not only to scholars of Nabokov's fiction but also to those interested in the intersections of humor and literature more broadly.

Summing Up: Highly recommended.

--A. J. DeBlasio, Dickinson College "CHOICE"

Paul Grant has thought longer and harder about Nabokov's humour than anyone, and longer and harder about humour theory than any Nabokovian. Just as Nabokov appeals to the senses, the emotions, the thinking mind, and the imagination, so, Grant shows, Nabokov's humour appeals across the range of human experience from physical slapstick to metaphysical pratfalls.--Brian Boyd, University of Auckland

Writing seriously about humour is a dangerous affair and taking on Nabokov's humour multiplies the risks. Paul Grant negotiates such difficulties, and much else, with patient and intelligent care. His book is a major study of laughter and enlarges our understanding of Nabokov's work in a great many ways.--Michael Wood, Princeton University