Word: likes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...machinery-the August annual rate of personal income was down $3 billion from the July annual rate and $4.5 billion below the June rate. Since the steel strike started last July 15, an estimated 500,000 steelworkers and 155,000 workers laid off in allied industries have lost something like $700 million in wages...
Author Humes does his work in flashbacks, not the smooth ones of a Marquand, but brusque revelations carved out like sections of a monument to doom. Unfortunately, he also chooses to interpolate interior monologues, which prove only that he has not read James Joyce well enough. But these form a minor irritant compared to the book's merits -clean writing, crisp description, and a surprisingly accurate sense of the bitter relationships, mostly unspoken, between the enlisted Negroes and their commander. Author Humes is no optimist. Every page of Men Die implies an underlying sense of doom for mankind...
Sebastian Knight, a novelist, has fallen through the last trap door, death. His half brother, the nameless first-person narrator of the novel, feels the loss like a psychic amputation. It is as if a great secret had been buried with Sebastian, perhaps the meaning of life itself. The half brother determines to ferret out the secret by reconstructing Sebastian Knight's life in a biography. His quest takes him to a college chum of Sebastian's at Cambridge who recalls a miserable emigre trying desperately to be more pukka than the sahibs. (Nabokov graduated from Cambridge...
...argument suggests that Nabokov is applying The Method to writing. He occupies his characters like houses; they have the lived-in look. As early as Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's writing was rich in fringe benefits. There is his animistic imagery: a stopped clock face wears "the waxed moustache of ten minutes to two," the first spring zephyrs are "cold-limbed ballet-girls waiting in the wings." There is the unflinching refusal to sacrifice art to the urgencies of politics: "Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936-it was always year 1." There is the verbal clowning...
Some of the episodes are clearly autobiographical. Like Serezha, for instance, Author Pasternak was once a tutor in the home of a well-to-do merchant. As a tutor, Serezha is plagued less by his duties than by the drives of his own masculinity. He has tortured Platonic talkfests with Anna Arild, companion to the mistress of the house; Anna is a strait-laced Danish widow who interprets Serezha's every comment as a prelude to seduction. Finally, sexual tension drives him into the arms of the town prostitute, a "hoarse beauty" of an earthiness so casual that, "while...