Word: lepidopterists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lunatic," said the butterfly hunter. "Oh. Then probably you wouldn't know the way to Nocknagel Road." But the lepidopterist does, and eventually the searcher lands where he belongs, in the arms of a beautiful poodle. Which is all right: the hero is fond of putting on the dog. In Tiffky Doofky (Farrar. Straus & Giroux; $7.95), William Steig shows why his juvenile following equals the Pied Piper's, and how four decades as a New Yorker cartoonist have taught him exactly where and how to pull his punch lines...
Poor Godfrey struggles through years of rejection before a rich young man accepts him, much as a lepidopterist might collect a grotesque rare moth. When the young man dies, he leaves Godfrey enough money to go to Britain's best plastic surgeon. What emerges is a face of such beauty that it suggests a saintly soul. Far from it. With beauty comes vindictiveness. Godfrey is bent on revenge for being spurned so long. He becomes a famous preacher who cries out to vast audiences: "Christ died for man to atone for sin. Can we do less...
...French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) came in impressive sequence, one surpassing another in virtuosity, like the work of a magician developing his craft, slow motion, before his audience. The Collector was a comparatively simple pass?butterflies in psychotic transformation turned into pinioned women, perhaps a gothic variation on Lepidopterist Nabokov. In The Magus, Fowles worked gaudier effects: allegory, romance, black magic. The French Lieutenant's Woman played the entire Victorian milieu against the 20th century; Fowles could so persuasively dream up another world that he was free to call all of it into speculation by proposing alternative endings...
...Literary Lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, 74, identified a unique American species, the Nymphet, in his 1958 novel Lolita. Although the work was internationally acclaimed, it failed to win any of the major American book awards. In fact, the Russian-born Nabokov, who is frequently mentioned as a potential Nobel prizewinner, has picked up few prizes; five of his novels have been nominated for National Book Awards, only to be ultimately passed over. Now the self-described "pleasant outsider" has landed one of the country's most distinguished prizes: the National Medal for Literature, awarded for a living American writer...