There are many lustrous gems embedded in this gorgeous essay by Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov, including the first three sentences...
Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs (LOOK LEFT), and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice.
...and this:
At 600 pages, two or three times Nabokov's usual fighting-weight, the novel (Ada) is what homicide detectives call "a burster". It is a waterlogged corpse at the stage of maximal bloat.
And countless others, some from Amis himself, others on loan from his subject, like the extraordinary passage Amis chooses to close the piece:
From Lolita, as the fateful cohabitation begins (nous connûmes, a Flaubertian intonation, means "we came to know"):
"Nous connûmes the various types of motor court operators, the reformed criminal, the retired teacher, and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream."
