Word: bended
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. The Rev. J. Hugh O'Donnell, 52, president (1940-46) of Notre Dame University, a letter man as center on the 1915 Irish eleven; of cancer; at South Bend...
...BEND SINISTER (242 pp.) - Vladimir Nabokov-Holt...
This novel, like Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus, shows how heady a wine the English language may be for a foreign writer of parts who has thoroughly acquired it. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov's second novel in English (he has written seven in Russian), is one of the most intelligent nightmares of dictatorship in modern fiction. It is also a lip-smacking over the flavors of English prose to rouse the tired syntax in 10,000 editorials. Nabokov's style glimmers with reflections of many great styles (Gogol's, Flaubert's, Joyce...
...form, Bend Sinister is a frank piece of dreamwork. Real as only a serious work of imagination can be, it tells the story of Philosopher Adam Krug during a revolution in a dream country which has strong resemblances to Germany, to Russia and, in certain aspects, to the U.S. The frightened faculty of his university call on Philosopher Krug to intercede for their institution with the new dictator, Paduk (nicknamed the Toad), who was a clammy schoolmate of Krug's 30 years before. Krug refuses; the dictatorship goes...
...secret of Bend Sinister's effect is that it places side by side, heightened by the selectivity of an adept and angry writer, the most moronic abominations of totalitarianism and the finest lights of the secular European mind. The hoaxed and flattered humanity of the mass man is contrasted with the honest and deeply suffering humanity of the individual; but all this is done so lightly that it seems a mocking and superior amusement...