Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lolita. Wind up the Lolita doll and it goes to Hollywood and commits nymphanticide. Director Stanley Kubrick and Novelist-turned-Scriptwriter Vladimir Nabokov shadow the plot of Nabokov's perverse and remarkable novel rather faithfully, but they have filtered out its shades of meaning. Those who know the book will hoot at this decontamination; those who do not will be mystified as to how the story ever got its lurid reputation...
...ducks the duty of specifying Lolita's age and gives the part to a girl of 14 who looks a round 17. Making her movie debut, Teen-Ager Lyon is simply overmatched by the demands of her part. She acts knowing rather than sexy, and she lacks what Nabokov himself has defined as the "demoniac" essence of the near adolescent nymphet, an "elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm...
...club. He shows none of the Old World graces and cultural refinement that made the book's Humbert seem more of a sexual gourmet than a sexual monster. In the book, it was Humbert who appeared romantically naive when Lolita quite casually and ironically seduced him. As Nabokov created her, Lolita was as completely a symbol of innate depravity as Melville's Billy Budd was a symbol of innate innocence. But in the movie, she seems to fall into Humbert's voracious clutches to avoid going to an orphanage after her mother is killed...
Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. A brilliantly clever arrangement of mirrors, trap doors and hidden staircases bamboozles readers, critics and perhaps characters in this thoroughly eccentric novel, most of which is in the form of a windy gloss of an old poet's last work, by an academic woodenhead who may or may not be the deposed, homosexual ex-king of a land called Zembla...
Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. A monstrous, witty work of often bewildering verbal agility, in which a respected old poet is annotated to death by a lunatic scholar-or is he an exiled king...