ŷ������

“Carrying his purchase, wrapped in brown paper and Scotch-taped, he entered a bookstore and asked for Martin Eden.
‘Eden, Eden, Eden,�� the tall dark lady in charge repeated rapidly, rubbing her forehead. ‘Let me see, you don’t mean a book on the British statesman? Or do you?��
‘I mean,�� said Pnin, ‘a celebrated work by the celebrated American writer Jack London.��
‘London, London, London,�� said the woman, holding her temples.
Pipe in hand, her husband, a Mr Tweed, who wrote topical poetry, came to the rescue. After some search he brought from the dusty depths of his not very prosperous store an old edition of The Son of the Wolf.
‘I’m afraid,�� he said, ‘that’s all we have by this author.’��
Vladimir Nabokov �� Pnin
I read Martin Eden in my early adolescence and in the end I even shed a tear or two��

The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap. He wore rough clothes that smacked of the sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the spacious hall in which he found himself. He did not know what to do with his cap, and was stuffing it into his coat pocket when the other took it from him.

A young man from the bottom of society�� But he has a dream�� He is ambitious and he wants to win�� He is a man of willpower and volition�� He is for knowledge and education�� He starts learning�� And he falls in love��

During those several weeks he saw Ruth half a dozen times, and each time was an added inspiration. She helped him with his English, corrected his pronunciation, and started him on arithmetic. But their intercourse was not all devoted to elementary study. He had seen too much of life, and his mind was too matured, to be wholly content with fractions, cube root, parsing, and analysis; and there were times when their conversation turned on other themes �� the last poetry he had read, the latest poet she had studied. And when she read aloud to him her favorite passages, he ascended to the topmost heaven of delight. Never, in all the women he had heard speak, had he heard a voice like hers. The least sound of it was a stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and throbbed with every word she uttered.

But he loves in vain�� He keeps relentlessly moving forth and upwards�� He becomes a writer�� He succeeds�� He is published�� He becomes renowned�� Now those who used to despise him cringe�� But along with the fame arrives frustration��

“It was work performed! And now you feed me, when then you let me starve, forbade me your house, and damned me because I wouldn’t get a job. And the work was already done, all done. And now, when I speak, you check the thought unuttered on your lips and hang on my lips and pay respectful attention to whatever I choose to say. I tell you your party is rotten and filled with grafters, and instead of flying into a rage you hum and haw and admit there is a great deal in what I say. And why? Because I’m famous; because I’ve a lot of money. Not because I’m Martin Eden, a pretty good fellow and not particularly a fool. I could tell you the moon is made of green cheese and you would subscribe to the notion, at least you would not repudiate it, because I’ve got dollars, mountains of them. And it was all done long ago; it was work performed, I tell you, when you spat upon me as the dirt under your feet.��

Fiction�� And reality blindly follows fiction�� Virginia Woolf�� Ernest Hemingway�� Sylvia Plath�� Richard Brautigan�� David Foster Wallace��