"Beauty plus pity"

This book is a thesis submitted for a Master's degree in English literature at the University of Toronto. It focuses on the emotional content of Nabokov's English-language fiction, with special emphasis on Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin and Ada. The author feels some impatience with the prevailing scholarly emphasis on, and analysis of, the multi-lingual puns and dense literary allusiveness of Nabokov's work, at the expense of what makes the books actually readable: the humor, the narrative propulsion, the vividly-drawn characters, the use of suspense, enchantment, and of course the deeply moving treatment of the themes of love, loss, nostalgia, aging, jealousy, betrayal—the "throb in the throat of the story," as Nabokov put it.