Word: humbert
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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...
...perplexed affluence of the '50s. Eventually, Honda becomes joylessly rich. He degenerates from spiritual voyeur into Peeping Tom-a transformation reflecting Mishima's own contempt for the vulgarization and materialism of postwar Japan. As the novel ends, Honda, who has begun to sound like a Japanese Humbert Humbert in his pursuit of his Thai princess-now a student in Japan-secretly watches her in a lesbian embrace. Then Honda's mansion at the foot of Mount Fuji burns to the ground like a pyre at Benares, the flyaway ashes sporadically sizzling into his new swimming pool...
...enduring is the web of kinship that only two things can alter it. One is the American value system, which is causing the Old World family structure to crumble and is weakening some of the once-powerful crime dynasties. According to Historian Humbert Nelli, the Mafiosi's respect for authority-a trait that used to cement loyalties-is decaying. For this reason, more and more Mafiosi are deciding to go straight. In one Mafia family that Ianni studied, only four out of 27 fourth-generation Italian-Americans are connected with organized crime. Of the remaining...