Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...novelists." There are memorable figures, of course: Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, John O'Hara's Grace Caldwell Tate and Gloria Wandrous, Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan, Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Steinbeck's Ma Joad, Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara, Nabokov's Lolita, Roth's Sophie Portnoy...
Like the limerick, the pun may well be a folk-art form that defies condescension, scorn and contempt, and possess es the lust for survival of an amoeba. There will always be some, like that formidable adamant, Vladimir Nabokov, who believe that the pun is mightier than the word, that people who cannot play with words cannot properly work with them. "A man who could call a spade a spade," Oscar Wilde remarked, "should be compelled...
...Glory, Nabokov...
...disappearance hardly seems tragic, for he is so patently a repository of memory and romance. Indeed, one of his earliest temptations is to step into a picture in his Crimean bedroom showing a path that disappears into a wood. He is very much like one of Nabokov's most delightful creations, Art Longwood of the poem "Ballad of Longwood Glen," who climbs a tree and simply disappears...
Glory is the painstaking work of a brilliant young writer who is still testing his skills, as Martin tests experience, "with different acids." Nabokov has mastered so many narrative techniques that one sometimes forgets that like most great novelists, he is usually telling the same story. It is no flaw that Glory resembles Speak, Memory as well as his first novel Mary, and even Ada. In it, as in all his work, he caresses his opulent memory and exalts it. This fresh and graceful book is pervaded by what, in an aside, Nabokov calls "a writer's covetousness...