Word: nabokovian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from the U.S.S.R., four dramas make their first appearance in English, translated by the author's son Dmitri. All are adjectival, although an occasional verb wriggles by to enliven the proceedings. All glisten with the celebrated Nabokovian cunning; all are souvenirs of the post-revolutionary epoch when, in some violent reversal of fairy-tale tradition, Russian aristocrats popped up in Europe as commoners, driving taxis, hiring on as movie extras and waiting on tables...
...most provocative territory in the Nabokovian universe remains the convolutions of the brain. In the final play, The Grand-dad, this century's refugees are replaced by a French nobleman whose good fortune helped him escape the guillotine in 1792. Decades later he runs into the frustrated executioner, now a senile gent determined to rectify the accidents of history...
...think of it is an enormity verging on, no, surpassing outrage." At this level of ambition, The Paper Men invites unfortunate comparisons with Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, the best and funniest work yet on the usurpation of a creative mind. Golding's book cannot match the Nabokovian magic; it is a random collection of jigsaw pieces jumbled together from different puzzles. -By Paul Gray...
...days with. The point of meeting Perelman would, however, not be to find out whether that redoubtable wit could drop a line or two over breakfast like those he penned for the Marx Brothers, nor to determine if he poured forth in conversation the astonishing, almost Nabokovian, word-play that runs through his myriad of New Yorker stories. Perelman would certainly have proven disappointing on these counts--no one could do off the cuff what he so meticulously crafted. Instead, one would meet Perelman to find out one thing--How much of that literary schmendrick persona that appears over...