Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Slightly pedantic word play, cultural booby traps, brisk leaps from the Bard of Avon to the Good Ship Lollipop, elegant divertissements for all occasions ?such things can be expected of Nabokov. But that is far from all. Russian by birth, a U.S. citizen who now lives in Switzerland, he has become, at 70, the greatest living American novelist, and the most original writer and stylist since Joyce. He is also an exile, a man who has triumphantly survived this century of the refugee, a man who has lost everything, yet transformed his losses through art and levity into...
...Nabokov's literary province is a bizarre, aristocratic, occasionally maddening amusement park in part devoted to literary instruction. It has many sideshows but only one magician. The general public, which chose to read Lolita as a prurient tale of pedophilia, enters through the main gate, hoping to meet the creator of that doomed and delectable child. A more sophisticated clientele moves beyond the midway to seek out and applaud Dr. Nabokov, the butterfly chaser, dealer in anagrammatical gimcracks, triple-tongued punster, animator of Doppelgänger, shuffler of similes. Prolonged exposure to Nabokov reveals much more. What he calls his "ever...
...Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Nabokov's latest novel, is already a bestseller. Nabokov's peculiar fascination ?and enduring power?escapes conventional measurement, but by any standard, the range and volume of his work in two languages is prodigious. It includes 15 novels (nine Russian, six English) and translations of other writers' work. His fiction differs from most novels in much the same way that a poem differs from a political treatise. One is an end in itself. The other, however intricate and elegant, is a means to an end. In a classic sneer...
...siècle examples were customarily tainted by a kind of Wildean flounce, or could be made to seem so. More often the doctrine has been propounded to excuse artistic self-indulgence, sheer gush, or at best the refined outpourings of private feeling. None of these excesses apply to Nabokov. Few writers have brought to the practice of art for art's sake?or indeed to thematic literature?the enormous talent and discipline, the overwhelming intellectual grasp, the scrupulously objective range of eye and ear that Nabokov commands...
Distaste for the rational, plodding, message-ridden, rhetorical problem novel?which Nabokov has condemned for years?is now widespread. But the objection to the traditional novel is essentially negative, rising as it often does from despair about the possibilities of rational, orderly, middle-class society. Black comedies, happenings, novels without plots are on the whole grim experiments, and the laughter they offer is at best a kind of comic rictus...