It’s bad enough that the narrator’s intellectual community is in disarray. As a platform for their own complaints (“I didn’t want to be in a society where there were individuals who didn’t read books”), students are exploiting the same 19th-century works that she used to make racist remarks about white privilege.
Contents
Sex, Lies and Infidelity on a Small College Campus
Although the narrator formerly felt respect for (and “It’s clear who’s now in command when it comes to morals, discipline, and principle on a liberal college campus when “the students rule the roost” at this particular time (overwhelming” desire for”) her own long-gone instructors.
It’s impossible to talk about Nabokov without mentioning The Cherry Orchard, his best-known work.
Because I thought art wasn’t a moral endeavour, I began to feel less and less like teaching “the narrator claims. Morality was first established when the state or the church became involved in the arts. “She is, unfortunately, unable to keep up with the modern world.
Then John’s Actions and Her Public Lack of Responding to them Spark Some of those Same Youngsters.
The narrator is forced to respond with the same sort of rambling as they did after being called a “beautiful, brilliant lady” by a bunch of young girls but being told that her presence in the classroom is sending out the wrong message. She frequently counsels her pupils, “We all operate under established frameworks and institutions.
“The atmosphere in which I work and live tolerates institutionalised racism, sexism, and homophobia.” When they do finally leave her office, she gives them a less-than-flattering nickname.
Vladimir’s visit, which includes a notable publication and an unstable (but attractive) writer-wife, diverts our hero, and he soon finds himself primping, working out, dipping into his book for conversation starters, and planning an adventure that could either be a seduction or a “Misery”-style kidnapping.
Her husband may be engaged in another foolish seduction even though his dismissal hearing is about to start, and their daughter is still going through her own romantic dilemma. Oh, and did I also mention the fire? This blaze definitely has a lot of elitism in it.
In the end, Jonas prefers to torture these people as writers to mocking them as English teachers.
On a panellist platform at a book festival in a smaller city like Calgary, Austin, or San Diego, I kept thinking about him and me. I kept thinking about him and I being on a panel stage.
Last Words
A suspected infidelity is made enormously more absurd when it is discovered that the characters in question are actually writing together (“Both of us, award winners, would stay in the same hotel and meet for a martini in the dark of the bar”), and “There are others who enjoy writing as well,” as one of them snaps at you.
