Word: nabakov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LIKE MAY, and this May has been especially pleasant what with a mammoth new Nabakov novel (Ada) on he stands and the rock-opera by The Who (Tommy) due out any day now and Frisbees in the air, and as if all this weren't enough the Lampoon has seen fit to trot out yet another Movie Worsts issue which, if not exactly a wretched excess (it's an annual tradition after all) at least qualifies as somewhat gratuitous when seen in any halfway decent cultural or metaphysical perspective...
BORN IN Virginia, Wolfe describes his childhood as "growing up in the first drive-in era." In accepting that birthright, Wolfe echoes Vladimir Nabakov, who -- in repudiating charges of Lolita's anti-Americanism--wrote, "I needed a certain exhilerating milieu. Nothing is more exhilerating than philistine volgarity." It is thus appropriately ironic that Tom Wolfe started out with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. Later, while working as a reporter in Washington, he discovered poor tenement families eating dirt; in the story that followed, Wolfe cited a 19th century American book that discussed the same phenomenon. Today, he concludes...
...Vladimir Nabakov, like Joseph Conrad, is a foreigner who has become one of the most important stylists in English; but, unlike Barth, he deals with human beings, not metaphysics. The charm, for instance, of the novel Pnin (included in its entirety in Nabokov's Congeires) comes not so much from the telling of the story as from the character of Pnin, a hapless professor of Russian in a small American college. There may be no real separation between style and content, but Nabokov uses his style to create a believable man, charming and pathetic. Having just fallen down a flight...
Although the censorship law prevents bodily contact between Humbert and Lolita, Kubrick and Nabakov do not leave as little as possible to the imagination. In the hotel scene Humbert tries desparately to arrange it so that there will be no roll-away bed for him. The eventual arrival of the bed late at night is funny enough, but even more amusing is the frightened face on Humbert the next morning when Lolita whispers in his ear presumably the very idea he was afraid to utter himself...
...Nabakov and Kubrick have handled a lurid subject with humor and imagination. The result is very funny at times, though it hardly burns with a gem-like pale fire...