Word: humbert
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...perk up this familiar rehash, Updike gives his clergyman a bag of Nabokovian wordplays and tries to pass him off as Humbert Humbert (in Lolita, Humbert observed, "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style"). Marshfield rattles off alliterations as if he were on death row. He describes a local nursery "which piously kept its Puerto Rican peony-pluckers in a state of purposeful peonage." With nary a blush he writes of returning home to the "fusty forgiveness of my fanlighted foyer." His frequent dissections of sex and theology revolve around a central question: How many...
...world that's laid out like a game of Risk. And there was Paths of Glory and Spartacus--really an amazing bunch of movies, like them or not. Now he's apparently working in Ireland on a version of the Thackeray novel, Barry Lyndon. Lolita stars James Mason as Humbert Humbert and Sue Lyon as the nymphet...
PATERSON, NEW JERSEY is a place that inspires people. It inspired poets Allan Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams, it inspired Angelo Bresci, the anarchist who killed King Humbert I of Italy before World War I, and to the city's lasting pride, it inspired "Leaping" Sam Patch, the only man to leap Niagara Falls without a protective device...
...Vadim, "I have been in excellent health throughout adulthood." He can be pleased with a literary career, which brought him in youth the heady "forefeel of fame" and later allowed him to strut as "a fat, famous writer in his powerful forties." Lechery has been a constant, though a Humbert-Lolita relationship with his daughter never flowered to the extent that he, in damp imagining, would have liked. Yet to each of four prospective brides, he has had to admit that he is cracked: "I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning my mental health...
...other works in its disregard of conventional plot, proceeding back and forth across time only by a logic of association. It also possesses an uncharacteristic and rather clammy eroticism. In this claustrophobic reverie, Gimpei Momoi, a 34-year-old schoolteacher, a dim cousin of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, disconsolately follows women, or schoolgirls, through the streets. Filled with a "masochistic self-disgust" that has its origins in his own deformed feet, Gim pei (which might almost be some accidental translingual pun - "Momoi the Gimp") is another of literature's repellent voyeurs - a wincing, hypersensitive defective...