From: George Steiner reviews Stacy Schiff
Category: Other
Date: 8/2/99
Time: 5:56:27 AM
Remote Name: 130.159.36.194
There was a fairly interesting review of Schiff's biog of Mrs N in yesterday's "Observer". Here's the link:
http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/observer/review/story/0,3879,70179,00.html
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The review ends by asking "How right was the Soviet encyclopaedia, when it insisted Nabokov was 'an American novelist'?" Bloody good question to which I don't really have an answer. I suppose his most famous works were written in "Yanglish" and were mainly about the US in some way or another. But didn't his Russian upbringing influence the way in which he wrote about America, giving him an outsiders perspective? Then again before he lived in America he also wrote some pretty good books in Russian, but I suppose their content would preclude them from a Soviet canon.
I don't really see that it matters whether he was American, Russian, or European, in the end he was a human writer who wrote about being human. Why do the canon makers of different countries waste so much time claiming each other's writers? For example, Joyce is claimed by the Irish because he was Irish and wrote about Ireland and by the English because he wrote in English, but he found it impossible to live in either country so wrote his "masterpiece" in France. Similar can be said for Becket, who despite writing in French is still canonised as a great "english" writer. The same nonsense goes on with Eliot, Pound and James; the English claim them because they lived and wrote in England, the Americans because they were American. But in the end does it really matter? Why divide writers up by nationality or even by the language they choose to write in? Why not celebrate writers for their ability to communicate a common human experience rather than trying to bask in their reflected glory?