James Wood
speaker
815 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 15 Sep
James Wood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
is that this novel has, unlike um Seize the Day, a playful and sort of self conscious fictionality and self referentiality.
In in chapter five of the novel, eagle eyed readers will have noticed uh that Nabokov himself appears not once but twice, once uh as Cyrin, which was his uh pen name in Berlin when he was writing in Russian, and once as uh
as Vladimir Vladimirovic uh Nabokov himself.
So just situating it in that, I just wanted to do that to to to to alert our listeners to the fact that we're talking about a text that in many ways sort of ticks the boxes for postmodernism.
but that we're also dealing with a writer who, despite all that playfulness and game playing and fictionality, has, in his own way, a strong commitment to
the real or to some notion of realism, which might have to do with noticing the world, or whatever.
Uh we'll we'll we'll get to that.
Um
The series we've been doing, I mean, I I I titled it Who's Afraid of Realism?
Because I want listeners to be aware that that realism in its sort of traditional sense, I says I guess Seize the Day or or Madame Bovary
can be something you're afraid of in the sense that that realism actually, you know, it it goes with a scalpel into into society, into the body, into the self and and shakes things up.
Um but that also in
postmodern and contemporary modes, there's a there's a kind of anxiety about realism, whereby, as it were, you know, a bunch of contemporary writers, uh, we know we
we know who they are, are perfectly rightly I wouldn't say afraid of realism, that's that's a stretch, but are wary of it, uh bored of it, tired of it.
querulous uh about it.
So it's that sort of double thing that who's afraid of realism can contain both traditional realism's powers and can contain the idea that realism produces its own antibodies, its own querulous uh resistance.
And Penin might be a pretty good example of that.
And this might be the moment just to pause for a second, um for those listeners who haven't read the book or who haven't read the book for a while and forget some of the basics of the plot, might just be a moment to do a very quick overview of the
story of of Panin.
It's basically a book of it's a book of seven chapters, but uh we can think of it as a book of sort of picteresque comic episodes.
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