Changing the game

Paper Cuts on Ron Rosenbaum on Nabokov as game changer:

[In Slate] Rosenbaum wrote:

I have my own strong feelings about the question of genius in literature. I’ve always felt that if we look at the past century, Nabokov was a game-changer, as the academic phrase has it. Nabokov showed there is a place you can go, a place that the alchemy of words can transport reader and writer to, that no one had gone before. And Nabokov went there, with ease, in “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” So it’s hard to call any other writer in the past century a genius of the same order.

Really? I guess it’s time to push Proust out of the pantheon and kick Kafka to the curb.

And yet...I think R.R. is right!? (At 2 in the morning.)

(Am not going to read his Slate piece on The Orig. of Laura, though, b/c I want to come to it "fresh.")