Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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GLORY by VLADIMIR NABOKOV 205 pages. McGraw-Hill...
...Nabokov's nine emigre novels, written in Russian mostly during the '20s and '30s, this is the last to be published in English. One regrets at once that there will not be more. Though a brand-new novel is promised for late this year, it will not be prefaced by the thunderbolt from Montreux, which has become customary in these translations, in which the author instructs his Johnny-come-lately audience in his older works...
...Nabokov has become shameless in his attempts to control (and bamboozle) readers in these introductions. This time, without naming him, he gives particular hell to Critic Andrew Field -"a desperate saphead in the throes of a nightmare examination"-who had the effrontery to read Glory in Russian and beat the author to a published criticism...
...parents' early separation. No, there is no connection between Glory's dream world of Zoorland and Pale Fire's Zembla. Though the author admits that Martin might be "a distant cousin with whom I share certain childhood memories," one is enjoined against "flipping through Speak, Memory [Nabokov's autobiography] in quest of duplicate items." Instead, the dutiful reader -always feeling vaguely inferior to the ideal Russian reader-is urged to concentrate on "the echoing and linking of minor events, in back-and-forth switches, which produce an illusion of impetus: in an old daydream...
...reader has to be in literary training to follow Mosley's hopscotch course. He is one of a number of writers, the best of them Nabokov, whose subject is often the nature of creativity itself. What fictional furniture there is seems of secondary importance, to be moved around at will. Tony seems negligent and disillusioned. He is married to Elizabeth, whom he "likes," but his only real involvement is an obsessive affair with Natalia Jones, the wife of another M.P. On the face of it Natalia seems a routine bitch. Her jealousy, her suicide threats, her retreat...