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
Uh
And then and and what a brilliant and I rereading it, I did notice one fabulous there is a fabulous clue.
It's that when I think it's in chapter two or something, when Penin Pinin uh arrives uh arrives at the Clements house, Dubokov writes something like um Joan Clements had sort of had had met a few Russians like him before.
Or by the way, we should say
A wonderful joke throughout the book is that people are always saying, you know, I've met I've met your twin.
Our campus even has a prov there's always a Professor Panin somewhere uh on another campus.
Um but she thinks, you know, I've I've I've met R I've met Russian a few Russians before.
Um and the the thing that alerted me to the Don Quixote is that the phrase she she has is Don Cossack.
I've met a Don Cossack before.
Um
Um so I thought, aha, that's our that's our little that's our little message.
But what a what a brilliant response to reading Don Quixote and not liking it.
So on the one hand, you take the central Don Quixote conceit that in some ways our our comic hero is kind of a tissue of literature, right?
He's he's uh um
Mm-hmm.
you know, his his memories of his of his Russian version of Hamlet, uh of reading Hamlet or whatever, are stronger for him than than in some ways the entirety of Wendell College around him.
That brilliant cosmos inside his head is is a literary one.
But and here's the amazing thing, Nabokov takes the the armature of the of Don Quixote, and then
opposes, as he sees it, Cervantes' cruelty, and this is w where we're we're at genius level, by writing a novel of great kindness and generosity that also looks like a cruel novel.
That's amazing because it's narrated by a cruel narrator.
Showing 261–280 of 815 · page 14 of 41
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