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Reading Nabokov's collected lectures feels like being ushered into a private chamber where an aristocratic Russian butterfly collector is about to dissect your favourite novels with a pair of tweezers. Assembled posthumously from the notes he used at Wellesley and Cornell between 1941 and 1958, the book covers seven Western European works: Austen's Mansfield Park, Dickens's Bleak House, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, Proust's Swann's Way, Kafka's Metamorphosis, and Joyce's Ulysses. Updike's warm introduction sets the tone, but what arrives on the page is anything but warm. It is precise, imperious, and strangely exhilarating.

Nabokov's governing belief is that a great writer is above all an enchanter, and that the only honest way to read a novel is to treat it as a self-contained artefact of pattern and detail. He has no interest in Victorian social history when approaching Dickens, no patience for Freudian readings of Joyce, and outright contempt for the idea that fiction exists to transmit ideas. Instead he produces maps of Mansfield Park's estate, a working diagram of Bloom's house at 7 Eccles Street, and a zoologically accurate sketch of the beetle that Gregor Samsa becomes. Not a cockroach, he insists, for he is interested in bugs and not in humbugs. The effect is invigorating. I came away from the chapters on Madame Bovary and The Metamorphosis with a quickened sense of how great prose actually works, sentence by sentence, image by image.

Yet the approach has its blind spots, and they are not small ones. The Austen lecture reads like a sustained act of condescension, as though Nabokov never quite forgave Mansfield Park for not being written by someone else. The Dickens chapter, though full of delight at the novel's architecture, feels curiously truncated. The Proust lecture suffers from the fact that his students were only assigned the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, which leaves Swann's Way marooned from the larger cathedral it belongs to. And the running sneers at Dostoevsky, Conrad, Mann, Faulkner and Hemingway, scattered across the book as asides, grow wearing after a while. It is hard to shake the suspicion that some of these writers were dismissed rather than genuinely read.

There is also the matter of the book's static quality. These lectures were fine-tuned over two decades and then frozen in place, which gives them the lacquered feel of butterflies pinned in a case. Every novel, whether by Austen or Joyce, is ultimately subjected to the same aesthetic checklist, and occasionally the checklist misses what is in front of it.

Despite all of this, the book rewards the careful reader richly. Nabokov teaches you to slow down, to notice, to treat a novel as an object of attention rather than a vehicle for opinion. You may disagree with half his judgements and still find that his habits of reading have quietly rearranged your own. Distinctive, demanding, occasionally maddening, and genuinely illuminating, it remains one of the most idiosyncratic guides to great fiction ever committed to the page.