Word: lolitas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...between what she called the "goody-good" or "frilly-knickers" Hollywood films, she bit off some more demanding parts back home, including two in works written by her mother, Whistle Down the Wind and Gypsy Girl. The family, however, vetoed one particularly gamy role: the lead in Lolita. She was 14 then, and sees now that "I wasn't ready...
...time when so many novelists are merely tinkering with far-out techniques or grinding out hunks of undigested raw material, Nabokov is an artist who fastidiously constructs intricate plots and dazzling verbal mosaics. He creates books without precedent in form (Pale Fire) or treatment (Lolita). He can also be a clever ice skater, stylishly tracing or following someone else's figures-the Conradian Laughter in the Dark, for example, or the Kafkaesque Invitation to a Beheading...
...Nabokov commanded a relatively tiny public in emigre circles. When he went to America before World War II, he painstakingly learned every nuance of English and translated his works back and forth in an effort to find a wider audience. He achieved notoriety before legitimate fame in 1958 with Lolita, and Field argues that the book, in which 42-year-old Humbert Humbert lusts for a child of twelve, would not have shocked nearly so much if readers had understood Nabokov's deeper preoccupations...
...Lolita, says Field, "is a novel of prisons." The idea for it came to Nabokov from a Paris newspaper account of a monkey who, "after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." Humbert Humbert is a prisoner of lust. He imprisons first Lolita, then his deadly rival Quilty. Later he writes his memoirs from prison. For Nabokov, the book's theme is love-and the necessity to liberate love from "its extreme and seemingly mutually exclusive opposite, lechery." Eventually...
...would happen if I put in a long-distance call from my desk right now? No answer? No such number? No such country?" Highest Rank. No such country. The present has deservedly rewarded Nabokov, now 67, whose novels in English-The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Pnin, Lolita and Pale Fire-have placed him in the highest rank of contemporary writers. These books stimulated a demand for the au thor's total work, so that most of his earlier Russian novels have now completed the journey into translation...