I totally agree with that.

Vladimir Nabokov in my opinion dwarfs James Joyce -- it's not even a contest -- even when James Joyce's is at his best. And at his best, he's stylistically quite good. I think James Joyce's strongest writing is at the beginning of Chapter 2 in Ulysses. I also like his short story "Araby," from his collection called Dubliners, and, from that same collection, "The Dead," which has a very beautiful ending paragraph. Yet I've long considered James Joyce the most overrated writer of the 20th century -- if not of all-time -- and Nabokov's fulsome love of Ulysses never ceases to puzzle me.

Nabokov does, though, nail it here, I think, with the, as he says, "unfortunate Finnegans Wake." Perhaps it's true what we bartenders sometimes offhandedly say: Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder.