Word: knaves
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Many years ago, when I was 17 or 18, living in China, my father introduced me to books of Vladimir Sirin, which was Nabokov's pseudonym at that time. The first books that I read were The Luzhin Defence; King, Queen, Knave; Invitation to an Execution and some delightful short stories written in Russian. I kept all of his books for years, reading them over and over until they resembled worn-out library books; unfortunately, I lost them in a fire during the war in Manila...
...Mode. At 28, Reed is both the most entertaining new journalist in America since Tom Wolfe and the most unprincipled knave to turn name dropping and voyeurism into a joyous, journalistic living. His detractors appear to be in the minority, however, and to the 30,000 readers who have thus far bought his recent book, Do You Sleep in the Nude?, he is a fascinating gossip who has recast the interview format in his own bitchy image. Son of a Texas oil-company supervisor, Reed spent his formative years in the South traveling from oil boom to oil boom...
KING, QUEEN, KNAVE by Vladimir Nabokov. The eternal love triangle gets some witty twists in this first English-language edition of a novel written in 1928, when the Russian-born prose master was a 28-year-old emigre living in Berlin...
Actually, his later novels, notably Lolita and Pale Fire, are far more elaborate. Even Laughter in the Dark (originally published in 1932 as 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...
...theme is the nature of fiction itself. By putting his comic trio through a series of abstract stances-a modification of the futurist and expressionist influences that swept the arts in the '20s-he never allows the reader to forget that fiction is essentially artifice. In King, Queen, Knave, the artifice may be a little too obvious, but intelligence and wit keep it working smoothly to the end. Nabokov himself could well have been thinking of this "bright brute" when he described a certain variety of butterfly he once discovered in the French Alps: "It may not rank high...