Word: nabokov
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...calculating craftsman. The Irish novelist’s 1998 “The Book of Evidence” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and his 2005 novel “The Sea” won it. Critics have compared his dreamy, playful writing to that of Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf; Don DeLillo praised his work as “dangerous and clear-running...
...James Wood’s popular class “Postwar British and American Fiction,” the first half of a lecture is invariably devoted to Wood reading aloud his favorite excerpts from the book under discussion. “Flip to page twenty-nine where Nabokov writes, ‘The cat, as Pnin would say, cannot be hid in a bag.’” Wood grins, before eagerly pushing forward, “Ah, yes, yes! There’s a great bit four pages earlier when Pnin gets dentures and Nabokov describes...
...recited "At the Taedong River," an occasional poem that reportedly much moved the fearless Dear Leader. An earlier piece, written after a ramble around the Hermit Kingdom the year before, heralded the future of the North Korean capital as a lepidopterist's playground that would be the envy of Nabokov: "Fifty years from now," Ko wrote in his 1999 collection Abiding Places, "May this be a city where window-glass butterflies/ Swallowtails, orange tips, duskywings, skippers, blues/ Mourning cloaks, awlets, dryads, ahlbergia & red admirals fill the air." (See 10 things to do in Seoul...
...Nabokov deserves better than his offspring’s circular logic; these notes for what could have been remain genuinely tantalizing, especially in their flirtation with the idea of an “original” in a world in which people can be novelized, duplicated, or obliterated as desired. Yet his taste for parody trespasses well beyond tongue-in-cheek. Every character is either neurotic, socially oblivious, a raging nymphomaniac, or all three. Philip Wild is not only morbidly obese, but can be seen walking striped cats on leashes down the street. Flora is groped...
...pulled out all the stops in the book’s physical presentation. Possessing a pleasingly minimalist jacket featuring white letters dissolving into black, “Laura” reproduces on each page of its heavy gray cardstock one of the 125 lined index cards on which Nabokov penciled his story. And each card is perforated along the edges for the ultra-aficionado—who, having exhausted the author’s other collections, can pop out the notes to feverishly arrange and rearrange elements of the plot just as Nabokov himself is said to have done...