Word: lovelies
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that great war, Williams argues, the only cease-fires are the truces of love, in which two people give each other to each other in an affinity of body and spirit. For a brief moment, they are immune to the world's malice, corruption and despair. In a transport of ecstasy, they defy the cruel and inexorable laws of the universe. Inevitably, the war is resumed...
...addicted to plaintive monologues and a frustrated effort to seduce the Japanese barman. The barman (Jon Lee) is a model of stoic restraint and may represent serenity. He also represents something Williams does not admire: a planned hibernation of the spirit in which one evades any commitment to love, hate or passion. Instead of eloquence, the play offers truncated, disjointed sentences. Inertia usurps the role of action; the prevailing mood is torpor. All that Williams seems able to contribute is a little banal philosophizing about how the creation of art saps a man's life. Still, there...
...childhood. With his wealthy and gifted family, he lived in a town house in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, and at Vyra, an idyllic, rambling country estate. For Nabokov, his two brothers and two sisters and their parents, life, especially at Vyra, seems to have been the living lesson in love, order and responsibility that all ancien regime childhoods should have been but so seldom were...
...easy entry on the boy-meets-girl plot level, Nabokov indulges in a tale about Van Veen and his half sister Ada Veen. They fall in love at the respective ages of 14 and twelve and begin an energetic sex life in the nooks and dells of the family's rural estate. Over the years, their floating orgy suffers prolonged periods of inactivity. In their old age, however, Van and Ada reunite and mate?now in a highly figurative way?melding into an unbeing that Nabokov calls Vaniada. Licensed allusion hunters will find that Vanadis is an epithet for Freya...
Nabokov sums up these amorous doings in a mock dust-jacket blurb that closes Ada by describing only the book's most superficial aspects. Long before he gets around to that, though, a suspicion has set in that the surface love story is as different from the real Ada as a bicycle reflector is from a faceted ruby. More even than Lolita and Pale Fire, Ada is studded with assaults and asides directed at literary forms, figures and fashions. Along with its masquerade...