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Nabokov was very influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and the French. I'd recommend Madame Bovary, In Search of Lost Time, maybe Balzac's Human Comedy collection.
Oh, I forgot to add The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Wilde's a master of flowery prose.
I'm just gonna throw out some names -
Proust
Joyce
Woolf
Faulkner
Pynchon
Stein
Beckett
Kafka
Gaddis
Nabokov was an expert on Ulysses, and I believe that there are some features of Lolita that were pulled from that.
How about Thomas Mann?
^how about no
How about offering a reason why Thomas Mann is not to be considered among the great writers/stylists of the past century?
By the way... there are brilliant writers/stylists beyond the limitations of the 20th century:
Lawrence Sterne
Virgil
Dante
Edward Gibbon
Flaubert
Theophile Gautier
Henry James
Thomas De Quincey
Robert Burton
Just a few names that come to mind.
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
flaubert?
i briefly flipped through his madame bovary and his prose seemed very ordinary and simply descriptive
One might not like Madame Bovary (I haven't), but calling it a "very ordinary and simply descriptive" is just foolish.
haha, be aware that that was based on briefly flipping through it (probably lasted 15 seconds)
briefly flipping through lolita, one is struck immediately by the prose
Madame Bovary has been called by many the "perfect novel". Flaubert wrote with the sort of care usually reserved to the poet. It would seem that before you rush to making any blanket statements about a book, you might do well to have actually read it. How many pages of Mann did you skim over before making your snap judgment about his merits as a writer?
Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/
I find Mann, judging from all the aspects of his work, more limited than many of the greatest novelists who came before his time. However, he was an indisputable master of irony and one of the best smiths of the Bildungsroman genre. I think he more than deserves an apt comparison to Nabokov — he even may, in fact, have a significative advantage.
Gibbon seems oddly placed in this list if we are talking about style.Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I wrote a poem on a leaf and it blew away...
To be honest, Mann is not someone which style I would put together with Nabokov. I would not call Nabokov flowery either, quite otherwise. Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov are obvious options. Nabokov once claimed to share an empathic link with Borges. Irony make me think of Machado de Assis. Some of Henry James too.
Gibbon is pretty much reckognized as a great prose classicist. Stlukes just ignores (rightfully so) that Gibbons talked about the real world and not the true world.
I think Nabokov is superior as a stylist, although Mann may be an equal, if not greater novelist. Notwithstanding, his style is not exactly bad either. His use of irony is extremely varied and his prose, although not as focused as Nabokov's, had some strong points, many of which were poetic and lyrical.
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