Word: nabokov
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...PAPER, Richard Kluger -- VN: THE LIFE AND ART OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Andrew Field -- THE WISE MEN, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas...
Especially inventive are Nabokov's condensed metaphors, like those in the poetry of imagists such as Ezra Pound. Eerie images flash through the half-aware mind. In the midst of a frenzy of frustrated desire, the protagonist fleetingly notes that the morning's newspaper is dated the 32nd. When the sleepy little girl is led into the hotel, she watches a "doubling cat" through her blurred vision...
THOUGH HE IS no Humbert, the chilling "enchanter" is engaging in his own right. Like other protagonists in Nabokov's work, the precise, thinlipped jeweler is probably mad, as he indulges more and more in his wolvish fantasies. Yet, at the same time, his constant introspection reveals a natural need for self-justification and an odd paternal longing...
FATE, CRUEL AND derisive, always seems to trap the errant. In the fiction of Nabokov, this fate is the will of the author who is empowered by his art to create his characters and coolly plan out their destinies. He operates them like marionettes, then drops their strings and watches them collapse. Thus he deals with the enchanter...
...Enchanter is hardly the "dead scrap" that Nabokov called it when he first wrote it in Paris. The short novel has the appeal of the author's distinct style. It demonstrates his method of patterning fiction which, in Nabokov's words, combines "the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable...