Word: lolita
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Nabokov's prose is elegant and lucid, easy to read, and amusing. He is one of the few writers who can make a reader laugh out loud, even with "serious criticism" like his delightful essay "On a Book Entitled Lolita." In that essay he says, "After all we are not children, .not illiterate juvenile delinquents..."And that is one of the best reasons for liking Nabokov--he treats the reader as a sensitive, literate person. He sets out to tell amusing and moving stories, and this he does. He says, "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar...
...people are overjoyed to have them, whatever their reasons for coming. "It has to work," says Mrs. Lolita Chandler, veteran teacher of P.S. 178. "It will work. In spite of everything that people are doing to crush this beautiful thing. We have been floating around in this sea of negativism for too long. People don't have the courage to face the fact that the status quo just hasn't worked. Instead, they get themselves frightened by such ideas as Black Power and militancy. It's not that at all. It is just a simple matter...
...best were derivative-works restaged from the repertory of his former company, Russia's Kirov Ballet. By far the worst was his muddied Freudian version of The Nutcracker, in which Drosselmeyer, with a Humbert-Humbert lurch, is transformed into the prince who pays court to the Lolita-like moppet Clara. Although a bit heavier than when he first jetéed his way to the West, Rudi proved that he is still the most spectacular male dancer in the world...
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...
...trends. At 27 he made a killing with The Killing, a gritty city melodrama that is still being imitated. His next project was Paths of Glory, one of the first-and best-of this generation's antiwar films. After that came two more trend setters. The first was Lolita, a hollow, literalized adaptation of the book, for which it can be said only that it wore basic black before black comedy was fashionable. The other, Dr. Strangelove, was a major American contribution to the furiously active cinema of the absurd...