Anyone who has known me for any appreciable amount of time has probably grown weary of my extolling the brilliance of Nabokov's pen. I think Lolita is one of the most dashing English fiction ever written and his autobiography 'Speak Memory' is equally mesmerizing. His 'Pale Fire' just boggles the mind with its multi-layered complex creative form and his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is a fine painstaking study in how translations must be done. Nabokov was a renowned scientist, a strong chess player and a well liked professor at Cornell but among his many talents the one that really sweeps me away is his linguistic ability. And yet when he was compared with James Joyce, his reply was simple:
My English is patball compared to Joyce's champion game
And you really do understand why he said that when you read Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce's mastery is in its own category and there is no one who comes close. When I read it for the first time it was nothing but utter frustration for me. Far too many words that I didn't know the meanings of, far too stream of consciousness in style, far too erudite in its allusions. But now that I am reading it again with more patience and with more humility I am beginning to glimpse the genius of Joyce. All great writers break the rules of composition and take artistic liberties with 'proper' form but Joyce seems to make his own rules. His vocabulary is staggering but he doesn't use it to show off. He uses absolutely precise words for complex ideas, feelings, and objects and as if just to show that he doesn't give a flying toss about his precocious lexicon, he mixes those beautiful exact words with completely made up ones. At places he writes in beautiful complex constructions and at places in broken sentences which end in half a word. He captures elaborate emotions and gestures in single words and spends pages following spontaneous lines of thoughts which don't go anywhere. For its rebellious experimental form and for how well it works, Ulysses is the most virtuoso book I have ever read. I don't claim to understand it fully, not even close. But the little that I do understand gives me immense pleasure and satisfaction.