Word: nabokovian
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...about all that Fowles' novels have in common. "In modern art we ought to get used to the idea that the world of the imagination is a kind of landscape in which a writer can go wherever he likes." Among future excursions Fowles is planning: a novel of Nabokovian linguistic experiment and two "entertainments"-a detective thriller and a science-fiction story...
...this century, Vladimir Nabokov, master of fiction and of chess (TIME cover, May 23), operates in somewhat the same manner. The film of one of his early works, Laughter in the Dark, eerily reproduces the commonplaces of experience but gives them an irrational tilt. The viewer who accepts the Nabokovian construction can experience an acute problem of reorientation when he steps from the theater into the world...
...friend, Harvard Critic Harry Levin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's first novel written in English, was published. A haunting, accomplished and entirely Nabokovian novel about a man who loses his own identity trying to write the fictional biography of his lost brother, it appeared almost unnoticed. By the time he reached Cornell he had published Bend Sinister (1947), a study of a police state, parts of Speak, Memory, one of the most beautiful autobiographies in English. Yet he was barely known on campus as a man of letters, much less a literary genius...
...Montreux Palace Hotel. Not that there has been much night for him. "I am the insomniac of universal literature," he cries. "My wet nurse complained. I was always up, smiling and looking around with my bright eyes. I am awakened by my own snore, which is a Nabokovian paradox. Helpful pills do exist, but I am afraid of them. My habitual hallucinations are quite monstrously sufficient, thank Hades. Looking at it objectively, I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine...
Wish Fulfillment. In embryonic form, all of these Nabokovian traits and interests are present in The Waltz Invention. The hero, Salvator Waltz (Roland Hewgill), is a paranoiac who believes himself to be the possessor of a potentially earth-destroying machine that makes ordinary bombs look like firecrackers. Awaiting an interview with the Minister of War (Henry Thomas) of a kind of Balkan republic, he imagines how the interview will go and how his threats will be honored. The play therefore takes the form of megalomaniacal wish fulfillment, rather like Hadrian...