Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PALE FIRE (315 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov-Putnam...
...Vladimir Nabokov...
...critic, Russian or not, has yet been able to lock Vladimir Nabokov in a box, except for the clumsily made critical box labeled "cleverness" - a confinement not really confining, since cleverness implies an ability to get out of boxes. Still, by general acknowledgment, Nabokov is the cleverest author to write in Russian in the last few decades, and probably the cleverest in English since James Joyce, despite the fact that English is his third language...
...winning acknowledgment as the cleverest writer is a touchy business, a little like becoming Pope - one must not campaign for the election. Readers of Nabokov's new book, which is surely the most eccentric novel published in this decade, have considerable reason to feel that the author is campaigning. Pale Fire, like Lolita, is a monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work whose verbal agility is often bewildering. But unlike the earlier book, Pale Fire does not really cohere as a satire; good as it is, the novel in the end seems to be mostly an exercise in agility - or perhaps...
Thurgus the Turgid. Nabokov, of course, does this sort of turn spectacularly well. Solemnly the lardwit betrays himself, reporting that Shade's friendship "was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed." But as the reader reads Kinbote's line-by-line commentary on the poem, he sees that the annotator is afflicted with something more than boobery. Sanely or not, Kinbote has it firmly in his head that he is the deposed king of "a distant northern land" called Zembla, and that he was known to his adoring subjects as Charles the Beloved, son of Alfin...