Word: dreyer
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...Camera obscurd), which in setting, plot and theme strongly resembles King, Queen, Knave, is more intricately patterned. But King, Queen, Knave is tricky enough-the ap-pearance-and-reality theme as applied to the eternal love triangle. In Nabokov's idiosyncratic geometry, all three angles are obtuse: Kurt Dreyer, fiftyish, owner of a prosperous department store, is suffused with a jocular egomania; Martha, his 34-year-old wife, beautiful and sybaritic, is dimmed by compulsively romantic restlessness and anticipation; Franz, Dreyer's youthful nephew and employee, is a myopic, precariously balanced bumpkin...
...Dreyer and Franz occasionally attempt to squirm out of the two-dimensional plane in which Nabokov holds them captive. But most of the time, all three are as flat and glossy as the playing cards suggested by the novel's title. This enables Nabokov to give them the nimble shuffle that characterizes the mercurial plots of all his Action...
...aunt accidentally in a train compartment. They are unaware of his identity, as he is of theirs. Not a word is exchanged between him and them during the entire trip from his small home town to Berlin, where he will work in his uncle's department store. Dreyer idly casts a professional eye over the young spectacled passenger, sizing him up by the low quality of his haberdashery. In Martha's peephole of a mind, Franz registers as little more than a lifeless lump...
Died. Dave Dreyer, 72, Tin Pan Alley composer who made his fame in the 1930s by writing such toe-tapping tunes as Cecilia, Me and My Shadow, Back in Your Own Back Yard; of a kidney disease; in Manhattan...
...distance as if to draw metaphysical meaning from the sheer monotony of it. "I feel I'm staring into a fire that is about to be extinguished," muses Gertrud in a line that expresses the umber tone of the work precisely. The poignant revelation of Gertrud is that Dreyer, now 77, has made an old man's film reverberating with hand-me-down deepthink and reflective sadness...