Glory

I think I'll name my firstborn Vladimir. It's a little bit sick and ridiculous how good this man is at putting words on paper. I began reading Glory today (I picked up an original pressing of the hardbound English edition in a small antique shop in New Mexico for $2), and in the first three chapters, my eyes have conveyed to my brain expressions evoking such a breadth and depth of emotion as to almost feel preternatural in origin. I'm constantly taken aback at a turn of phrase or conceptualization of something otherwise mundane transformed into a thing of pure beauty. And I'm not exaggerating. Even just in the foreward by Nabokov, there are hidden gems like:

My second wand-stroke is this: among the many gifts I showered on Martin, I was careful not to include talent. How easy it would have been to make him an artist, a writer; how hard not to let him be one, while bestowing on him the keen sensitivity that one generally associates with the creative creature; how cruel to prevent him from finding in art - not an "escape" (which is only a cleaner cell on a quieter floor), but relief from the itch of being!

I can't really describe the feeling reading that gave me - if not quite epiphany, then certainly astonishment and deep admiration. It gave me a perspective on art I had never considered. The man's work oozes with this kind of wisdom and subtle cleverness - and this is just the foreward! Here again at the end of the first chapter:

Once upon a time there prowled marvelous beasts in our country. But Sofia found Russian fairy tales clumsy, cruel, and squalid, Russian folksongs inane, and Russian riddles idiotic. She had little faith in Pushkin's famous nanny, and said that the poet himself had invented her, together with her fairy tales, knitting needles and heartache. Thus in early childhood Martin failed to become familiar with something that subsequently, through the prismatic wave of memory, might have added an extra enchantment to his life. However, he had no lack of enchantments, and no cause to regret that it was not the Russian knight-errant Ruslan but Ruslan's occidental brother that had awakened his imagination in childhood. But then what does it matter whence comes the gentle nudge that jars the soul into motion and sets it rolling, doomed never again to stop?

I shudder to imagine never having added this author's enchantment to my life.