Word: nabokov
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...anti-Viet Nam protest is "something like a medieval carnival in a modern setting, with everybody changing places, the fool becoming king for a day . . . the police merging with the populace and even putting on false beards. But no more than a carnival did it 'solve' anything." Vladimir Nabokov, she notes, treats the Russian language "as a national treasure the usurper Bolsheviks appropriated from him, to turn over to the rabble." She ponders the absence of important fiction in prewar Germany: "Common sense tells you the way things are, rather than the way your covetous ego or prehensile will would...
...perhaps also because he could not dream of bridling his ferocious drive to invent and surprise. He seems to create buildings with the spirit other architects might bring to an amusement park. His work at its best is lyrical and joyously jam-packed, smart and sensuous, like a Nabokov story. He believes buildings should even be erotic. In the first of two shops he designed for Schul- lin jewelers in Vienna--a plush, narrow space with an irregular fissure in the gleaming facade--the allusion seems downright genital...
...says, has influenced his architecture most of all. He arrived at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1958 but found its "Prussian dogma" of modernism uncongenial. Breaking free, Hollein bought a Chevy and drove, covering 50,000 miles in a year and a half, just when Nabokov's Humbert Humbert and Kerouac's romantics were on the road. Recalls Hollein: "It was just incredible to me the space you have here, the sense of freedom." Seeing the West provoked a kind of epiphany. A generation ago, before pizazz had become architecturally fashionable, Hollein was out there on his own, learning...
...from the U.S.S.R. & Other Plays, Vladimir Nabokov -- Men and Angels, Mary Gordon -- Money: A Suicide Note, Martin Amis -- The Tenth Man, Graham Greene -- This Real Night, Rebecca West...
...pleasure in this book lies in the way Barnes circulates among his historical and imaginary characters and in his agile writing strategies. Obviously he has pinched a thing or two from Nabokov, like the brazenness and wit of Pale Fire. Barnes concocts wonderful lists, full of unnerving distinctions: animals, for instance, an enumeration of Flaubert's many parrot references, along with the fact that there are no parrots in Madame Bovary. A chapter contains contrasting chronologies, one of the author's public career and honors, the other of his failures and the early deaths of many of his family...