Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokov. This revival of a prehumous (1938) novel, although a mere Pninprick compared to the author's subsequent slash, foreshadows the maturer talent in describing a middle-aged Berlin art dealer of The Blue Angel epoch, whose life and dignity are degraded by a woman...
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK (292 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov - New Directions...
This book, first published in 1938, is one of Vladimir Nabokov's prehumous works. Like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Invitation to a Beheading, it was buried under critical neglect and popular apathy when it appeared, is now gaining a second life through the continuing Lolita boom. But Laughter in the Dark only superficially resembles Lolita; it is closer to the Heinrich Mann novel that became The Blue Angel, the famed Marlene Dietrich film of the same general setting and period. At its loftiest, Nabokov's theme is the degradation, by lust, of dignity and intellect...
Laughter foreshadows the mature Nabokov's brilliance and, compared with a lot of current fiction, is well worth reading. But what might have been searing in the book is somehow merely slick or shallowly cynical. Nabokov's gift for the vivid image is already sparkling, but his characters slip into caricatures. A tendency the later Nabokov has largely suppressed, of confusing imagination with prestidigitation, gets the better of him here, and the deftly manipulated mirror he holds up to nature reflects not life but simply more mirrors...
Inevitably, while working there, the ever-observant Nabokov kept a roving eye on Hollywood, a dreamland for which Lolita herself used to yearn. The movie colony may be hard put to know what to make of his conclusion: "It is quietest, sweetest, softest place in the world...