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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And and so on.
And it's at
Cornell University, where where he started teaching in nineteen forty eight and finished in nineteen fifty nine.
So it's in Ithaca, New York, wonderful um uh detail in itself, it's in Ithaca, New York, in the mid-1950s, that he starts writing um this series of fictional episodes that is the novel Penin.
And I I think it's just before before we get into the book, it's just worth thinking about.
I often do think about it.
I think about that extraordinary isolation because it's very Paninian in a way.
That extraordinary isolation and estrangement.
That must have greeted that must have been Nobokov's condition when he arrives in America and and continued for for a long time.
I mean, when he arrives in America, how many people, apart from the critic Edmund Wilson, who became a great friend and then something of an enemy, um how many people knew who Cyrin was and had read any of Syrin's novels in Russian?
And so I think of
Of I often think of Penin as um among all the things it is, a great campus novel, a very funny novel, a postmodern, unreliable, narrated novel.
I also think of it as a novel of sort of this extraordinary gathering of illusions and references, 80% of which must have been lost on American readers, but which matter for Nabokov.
Do you know what I mean?
It's a v- I in that sense I despite
Despite all the usual games and veils and fictionalities, it seems to me an incredibly and intensely personal novel.
I'm doing a horrible version.
Yes.
I I d I've I've I've read this too and it it it makes sense.
I mean we know that he he read Don Quixote and and felt it was horribly cruel.
Showing 241–260 of 815 · page 13 of 41
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