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I tried to give these stories a larger meaning than simply that of revenge, which is usually not a subject worth writing about as such.

This is going to sound monumentally egotistical, but at an early stage in my writing I became conscious of using wordplay that I knew wouldn’t translate well into another language. That came out of my obsession with the works of Vladimir Nabokov. So I stopped doing too much of that, which is difficult because wordplay comes fairly natural to me. And the problem with wordplay that’s too abstruse is this: if a reader doesn’t get it, then it was a waste of time to do it in the first place; if a reader does get it, it’s not really that much to get. I’ve analyzed the double entendres and multilingual puns in several of Nabokov’s books. That’s not what’s of most interest about him as a writer. What is interesting is his idiosyncratic persona and his obsession with death, harm, loss, and all those bad things which are at the core of literature in general but which, for a major big shot writer of the modern era, are especially pronounced in Nabokov.