Hygiene and the Assassin Book

I enjoy reading Vladimir Nabokov but I'm aware of his disdain for his readers. I've come across lines in his books which make that disdain too clear to ignore. It's true that those lines are often addressed to critics/reviewers for whom he seemed to harbour particular contempt, as in this line from The Gift, one hears the flippantly flat little voice of the reviewer (perhaps even of the female sex).
But the disdain feels directed at readers too. It's in the way he repeats episodes from one book to another. I can imagine him thinking that we don't read with enough attention to notice those repetitions. It's also in the way he sometimes feels the need to explain his own cleverness'as if we were incapable of figuring out his puzzles. In Speak, Memory, for example, the narrator remembers a car his family owned. Speaking of the new design, he says, The idea of speed had already given a slant to the steering wheel (sea-cliff trees will understand what I mean.) And readers wont?

That's all very well, I hear you say, but what has Nabokov's possible disdain for his readers to do with this book by Amélie Nothomb?

Let me explain. Nothomb's main character, Prétextat Tach (let's call him Text for short), is a famous writer who has nothing but disdain for his readers, and especially for female readers. He feels that most readers can't possibly understand the real intent of his fiction, and he believes that many of them only pretend to have read his books in any case. Critics and reviewers are aware that he holds them in extreme contempt too. The fact that Text has been a recluse for years has only added to the fearsome reputation he has developed.

At the beginning of Nothomb's novel, we hear that Text has been told by his doctors that he has only a few months to live. This news motivates him to give four interviews to literary journalists. The novel, written almost entirely in dialogue, is a very clever record of those interviews, each serving to fill the reader in on different aspects of the reclusive author's writing career and life.

But Nabokov wasn't a recluse, I hear you say.

He may not have been a recluse but he left his home in the US and chose to live in a hotel suite in Montreux during his last years. And he did have a fearsome reputation'he could be quite vicious about other writers as well as about critics. But it seems to me that the way he resembles Nothomb's main character the most is in the importance in his work of one particular theme: puberty. It's to be found in The Gift, in The Enchanter, in Lolita and in Ada, or Ardor. In Ada, or Ardor, which feels quite autobiographical at times, there are so many parallels between the life of the narrator, Van Veen, and the life of Nothomb's main character, as revealed in the interviews he gives, that I felt certain Nothomb must have used Van Veen as a model for Text.
Like Text, Van is dying, and he's confined to a wheelchair just as Text is. From his current home (which seems to be in Montreux, incidentally) Van is determined, in the course of a number of fractious interviews with his secretary, to revisit an episode in his life when he and his young cousin Ada lived an idyllic childhood in a beautiful estate somewhere in France. That idyl ended when his cousin Ada reached puberty.
Text's early life is almost a replica of Van's. He grew up alongside his young cousin on a large domain deep in the French countryside until puberty put an end to his idyl.

I wish I could interview Amelie Nothomb about this theory of mine but I'm guessing she'd send me packing, probably as quickly and as furiously as Text disposes of some of his interviewers, one of whom offers her own theory about what she feels lies at the heart of his work.

If you read Nothomb's book for yourself, be prepared to deal with a very devious and thoroughly unlikeable main character.

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P. S.
I've just read a short story by Henry James on the recommendation of a goodreads friend (thanks Katia). The story has provided me with the perfect pretext to attach an extra section to this review which I hadn't yet posted because it seemed somehow incomplete. I still feel that Nabokov's emphasis on the theme of puberty must have been an inspiration for Nothomb's book but I now wonder if she wasn't also inspired by Henry James. The James story I've just read concerns a reviewer who gets obsessed with discovering the theme that a rather evasive but celebrated writer claimed, in an unguarded moment, to be embedded in his work. The writer also claimed that his readers only pretend to read his novels'so there is a certain disdain for readers in his attitude too.
As I pointed out earlier, one of the four interviewers in Nothomb's story, a woman called Nina, is very obsessed with the hidden themes in Text's work, and that obsession, as in the Henry James story, has serious consequences. It's a very close parallel, and I'm still amazed that I should have stumbled on it so serendipitously.

Yes, I'm very glad to have read the James story. I had done my own detective work on Nothomb's novel, but Henry James has given me a name for what I, and indeed Nothomb's Nina, were actually doing: tracing The Figure in the Carpet.