Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
What if you had a first draft of your Kafka-esque Bartleby living-under-incompetent-Communism novel, and your friend told you, “This isn’t realistic, real Communists aren’t this easy to see through,” and you were like, “Yeah but the world of the novel being unreal is what the novel is about, so there,” and your friend was like, “That’s a pretentious excuse for writing poorly,” but you were Nabokov so you SAT DOWN AND MADE IT WORK, and nobody else would have been able to pull it off.
This is one of those books that would sound really cool when you’re like 20, but if you actually tried to write it, it would be terrible, and any other writer trying to do this would just look like a dork, but Nabokov does it and it’s just beautiful.
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