we ourselves flash and yearn

I was browsing the New Yorker’s website today when I saw that they had put up one of my favorite stories. It’s classic Nabokov: every sentence is so perfectly constructed that you begin to believe in the idea of ludic reading. It’s also clever on that meta-pomo level that Nabokov is probably responsible for mainstreaming; but whereas a book like Lolita is filled with the kind of delightful encoded linguistic puzzles that scholars spend lifetimes decoding, “Signs and Symbols” seems to deliberately reject the academic desire to read extratextual meaning into every possible allusion. And like the best Nabokov, it’s beautiful, sad, and rich.