Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MARY by Vladimir Nabokov. 114 pages. McGraw Hill...
...knew all of them. Alwyn the critic could sift a ton of aesthetic sludge and produce a column and a half of buoyant wit, pleasure and wisdom. It is stultifying to honor a man with lists, but it would be remiss not to mention his TIME review of Nabokov's Lolita, a model of incisiveness and insight; a brief and scintillating piece on Henry Miller that tells all anyone will ever need to know about that writer; and a short story called Something for Bradshaw's Tombstone, which prefigures much that Graham Greene would later have...
...with Erika too. He was also attracted to Eric, though they never quite made it to bed. In addition, there is Marietta Donegal, an aging mystical novelist who was once lover to both men. The incest angle is best read as a suborbital send-up of Ada, Vladimir Nabokov's incestuous riddle of time and memory. For starters there is Van Damm and Nabokov's Van Veen...
...impenetrably complex. Yet Rose produces dialogue like a witty tape recorder and invents caricatures just as effortlessly: a marvelously dirty-minded Jewish grandmother; a gentle, handsome racketeer who wants only to be liked. At his best Rose writes with sonorous richness that manages to suggest a blend of Nabokov and Edwin Arlington Robinson. One can hope that wit, style and moral imagination will save him from the truant temptations of fluency...
...Russia, where he endures the blatant irony of having a huge salad of royalty rubles thrust on him, Bech and the head of the Soviet Writers' Union joust with vodka glasses: "He toasts Jack London, I toast Pushkin. He does Hemingway, I do Turgenev. I do Nabokov, he counters with John Reed." Elsewhere, Bech vainly attempts to charm Yevtushenko by describing his own position in America not as a literary lion but as a "graying, furtively stylish rat indifferently permitted to gnaw and roam behind the wainscoting of a firetrap about to be demolished anyway...