Word: humbert
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...France isn't the only country that wants Noriega. Panama wants him for the far more serious crimes of murder and human rights violations. "We requested extradition," says Frederico Humbert, the Panamanian ambassador to the U.S. "We insisted on it. If the U.S. court system decides he goes to France, he will then have to go to Panama to fulfill the time that he needs to pay for the crimes that he has been found guilty of in our courts." Over the years, the Panamanian government has made several extradition requests, the latest as recent as January...
...narrator reminded me a little of Humbert Humbert [in Nabokov's Lolita], speaking of Russians and monsters...
...Yeah, except Humbert is arch, as well as being an assh---. Nabokov takes it one step further. I mean, the sexual bribes chapter, quite late on, begins with the sentence, "I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita's morals." That compounds the cruelty, because he's using it as the butt of his wit. So he's really complicatedly awful. It all works absolutely brilliantly. But my character's a bit more straightforward than that...
...some respects, the 13-year-old Hannibal reminds me of the young Humbert Humbert - hero, villain and narrator of Nabokov's Lolita. Each is a well-born lad cruising through an idyllic youth that is capsized when he is separated from the girl he loves. But whereas Humbert gets locked in a time warp, incapable of loving any female older than his childhood sweetheart Annabel Leigh, Hannibal transfers his love to Lady Murasaki. This knowing, generous woman has awakened the man in a boy, and the book's real suspense is not over whether Hannibal will find the killers...
...When Humbert Humbert sadly apostrophized his absent inamorata by crying, "Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with!", he was selling words short. Vladimir Nabokov, the verboleptic who dreamed up Humbert, surely knew this, as do his readers: Lolita is the wordplay lover's favorite novel. Numbers have their power; they can be squared, cubed, extended to infinity. But they can't match the universe of ideas and feelings that come into being when letters collide. Words create worlds...