Style Is Matter

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. * Slavic Review * The centerpiece of this erudite, philosophically sophisticated study is Nabokov's Lolitamost 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. * Nabokov Studies * The focal point of Durantaye's graceful and thoughtful book is Lolita, in particular the ambivalencethe uneasy mixture of empathy and antipathythat 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 morala 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. * Nabokov Online Journal *

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.

Introduction: Lolita, and a Hitherto Little Remarked-upon ReaderPart One: Reader and Response 1 Cruelty, or Nabokov's Reader 2 The Reality of the Author 3 The Criminal Artist 4 Safely Solipsizing 5 Anesthesia 6 Humberts Green LanePart Two: Style and Matter 7 A Riddle with an Elegant Solution 8 The Particularity of Literature 9 Lexicomania 10 The Fine Fabric of Deceit 11 The Figure in the Magic CarpetConclusion: StyleAcknowledgments Bibliography Index