Prose styles considered (with some help from AI)

My attempt to increase the amount of book reading I do is somewhat dwindling, due of course to the never ending new supply of easily absorbed video content on Youtube, as well as my love of watching it on the Samsung TV but then abruptly falling asleep on the sofa, and then feeling not quite alert enough to start reading when I do make it to bed.  (If I do read a bit, I'm not getting many pages in.)

Be that as it may, due to the influence of the name appearing time and again in relation to the Epstein file stories, I thought I might try reading Nabokov's Lolita, to see why it's so famous.   (I have never seen the movie versions, either.)   

I'm only about a quarter of the way through, and I think it's not bad (I can see why it appealed to Kubrick's dark sense of humour), certainly interesting, and mainly notable for its elaborate prose style.   There is one passage I recently read where it took a couple of pages  to describe an interaction (erotic for the protagonist and narrator of the story, of course) which in real life would seemingly have taken up about 15 seconds - using a thousand words to what could have been described with a fraction of that effort.  

That section was probably the one that made me think this:  this guy Nabokov is the stylistic polar opposite of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway.   They just couldn't be any more different.

I presumed today that I couldn't have been the first to realise the comparison, and so before the AI apocalypse kills the internet (or me), I asked Claude.ai if this was a commonly observed thing amongst critics.  Here's the answer (in part):

Yes, critics agree with this quite emphatically — it's actually one of the most commonly drawn contrasts in twentieth-century American/Anglophone prose style, though it comes with an important asterisk about why the two writers diverge.

The core opposition critics point to:

Hemingway is the standard-bearer for literary minimalism — short declarative sentences, plain vocabulary, almost no subordinate clauses, and a deliberate refusal to state emotion directly. His own "iceberg theory" (or "theory of omission") held that a writer could leave most of the meaning submerged beneath the surface, with only the barest facts showing above the waterline. The Old Man and the Sea is often cited as the purest distillation of this — spare, repetitive, almost liturgical in its plainness.

Nabokov sits at the opposite pole: ornate, allusive, syntactically elaborate, packed with wordplay, alliteration, multilingual puns, and elaborate metaphor stacked on metaphor. Where Hemingway strips away, Nabokov accretes. Critics often describe his prose as "jeweled" or "baroque," and Nabokov himself was famously dismissive of Hemingway's style — he reportedly called it essentially about "bells, bulls, and balls," a fairly contemptuous shorthand for what he saw as thin, macho, unadorned prose.

Curiously, when I asked for some links, it noted that it had got the quote about "bells, bulls and balls" the wrong way around:  it's "bells, balls and bulls", which seems an odd mistake for a system which is based on "what word appears next, probabilistically" at its heart.  It's only human, I suppose (ha ha).   

Actually, now that I think about it, is it because the non-human probabilistic aspect interfered with it just providing the quote as it was?  If so, odd if they can't make it ignore the algorithm if it has found a short, exact quote.  

Anyway, I will keep reading for now, and perhaps report back when finished. 

And finally, I am a bit worried that my writing style here is being too much influenced by AI's style.  I find myself wondering if I used to use as many hyphens as I do now, and I really don't know.   If it is, I guess it just will make it easier for my mind to be uploaded into the All Knowing Singularity/Noosphere/AGI thingy just before I die.   They better get on with finishing that...