The Hapless Seed

Have you tried Google’s Book Search? Talk about frustrating. I just keyed in “nabokov crown jewels pale fire,” to find the latest thinking on that novel’s supreme and running joke. I got some glimpses of Brian Boyd’s 1999 book-length analysis, but mostly its conclusion—along with the full index, the irony presumably unintended.

I got two quick glosses on Nabokov’s famous interview in which he mocked the scholar and critic Alfred Appel’s eagerness to learn the secret of the jewels: “Where, please, are the crown jewels hidden?” Nabokov’s nonanswer answer was included, and in one case nothing else, since the “snippet view” (from a collection of Nabokov’s nonfiction, Strong Opinions ) was just 30 words long, some of them chopped in half. There was a touch more disembodied analysis from a Cambridge University Press collection, but basically that was it. ...