Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Among the few U.S. novels that did not suffer from paucity of style as well as poverty of theme was Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion, a funny and tragic little story of children in the West. Another was Bend Sinister, Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant nightmare novel of European life at the advent of dictatorship. Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, an ambitious effort to analyze a modern type of disintegrated personality and to make it universal, failed in the second aim; but his descriptions of a Mexican setting were memorable. The finest short stories...
BEND SINISTER (242 pp.) - Vladimir Nabokov-Holt...
This novel, like Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus, shows how heady a wine the English language may be for a foreign writer of parts who has thoroughly acquired it. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov's second novel in English (he has written seven in Russian), is one of the most intelligent nightmares of dictatorship in modern fiction. It is also a lip-smacking over the flavors of English prose to rouse the tired syntax in 10,000 editorials. Nabokov's style glimmers with reflections of many great styles (Gogol's, Flaubert's, Joyce...
...Harmonious Majority." Life under the Ekwilist (equalitarian) regime is sketched by Nabokov with a disgusted charm unequaled by contemporary satirists. He has an ear for the obscene overtones of the dictator's loudspeaker: " 'From now on,' continued the tremendously swollen Tyrannosaurus, 'the way to total joy lies open. You will attain it, brothers, by dint of ardent intercourse with one another ... by adjusting ideas and emotions to those of a harmonious majority ... by letting your person dissolve in the virile oneness of the State...
When the Ekwilist State triumphs, murdering innocence, Nabokov's style is still playful, but it takes on a Swiftian intensity. Krug goes mad. And it is clear that the professor's doom (which is Europe's) came about not merely because he was honorable, but because he was vain, obtuse to evil, and absorbed in his own past...