In 1937 Vladimir Nabokov described the perfect novel during a lecture in Paris which he delivered to an audience including, rather Nabokovianly, the Hungarian football team:
What an exciting experience it would be to follow the adventures of an idea through the ages. With no wordplay intended, I daresay this would be the ideal novel: we would really see the abstract image, perfectly limpid and unencumbered by humanity’s dust.
Miss Herbert, Adam Thirlwell tells us, is an attempt at Nabokov’s ideal novel — ‘which is not...
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