Word: nabokov
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...Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, Martin Amis notes that as a student at Oxford, he "sometimes wished that E.B. White would call by, in a chauffeur-driven limousine, to offer me a job on the New Yorker. It never happened. But it happened to Updike...
This is the kind of multilingual humor practiced by Vladimir Nabokov, except that he would have let the reader make the translation. Subtlety is not Updike's intention. Tristao and Isabel may be descended from ancient legend, but they owe much of their character to Monty Python and those old underground comic books in which Popeye and Olive Oyl assumed positions not found in the funny papers...
Edmund White was born in Cincinnati in 1940. After a childhood spent "painting and dancing and singing and generally being a nuisance," he decided to become a writer. His literary hero was Russian-born novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who, after reading White's first two books, proclaimed him his favorite American author. White's fiction, like Nabokov's, is marked by the combination of a baroque linguistic sensibility with a mordant picture of middle America. White says he has always written as "a representative member of my generation of gay men." That purpose has not limited his work, which ranges from...
...think about it very much. It's quite a conscious strategy for me as I think it was for him. In my early writing I was thinking of my ideal reader as a European, heterosexual woman--Mrs. Nabokov in fact, who did actually read my writing and would write me nice letters about it. I think I had sort of chosen her as my reader because I thought if I think of her then I won't just be nudging another gay person in the ribs with little in references. In other words I would be forced to render whatever...
...winning cadres of acolytes and legions of notional recruits, he and his ideas regularly attracted sharp attacks, often from influential quarters. As early as 1909, philosopher William James observed in a letter that Freud "made on me personally the impression of a man obsessed with fixed ideas." Vladimir Nabokov, whose novels trace the untrammeled and unpredictable play of individual imaginations, regularly tossed barbs at "the witch doctor Freud" and "the Viennese quack." For similar reasons, Ludwig Wittgenstein objected to the pigeonholing effects of psychoanalytic categories, even though he paid Freud a backhanded compliment in the process: "Freud's fanciful pseudo...