Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Vladimir Nabakov, like Joseph Conrad, is a foreigner who has become one of the most important stylists in English; but, unlike Barth, he deals with human beings, not metaphysics. The charm, for instance, of the novel Pnin (included in its entirety in Nabokov's Congeires) comes not so much from the telling of the story as from the character of Pnin, a hapless professor of Russian in a small American college. There may be no real separation between style and content, but Nabokov uses his style to create a believable man, charming and pathetic. Having just fallen down a flight...
...Nabokov's prose is elegant and lucid, easy to read, and amusing. He is one of the few writers who can make a reader laugh out loud, even with "serious criticism" like his delightful essay "On a Book Entitled Lolita." In that essay he says, "After all we are not children, .not illiterate juvenile delinquents..."And that is one of the best reasons for liking Nabokov--he treats the reader as a sensitive, literate person. He sets out to tell amusing and moving stories, and this he does. He says, "For me a work of fiction exists only insofar...
Occasionally Nabokov plays games, as in the acrostic in "The Vane Sisters," but basically he eludes explication and literary criticism. He is a magician who gets us to watch the rabbit, not the false bottom of his hat. His style illuminates, it does not blind. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, part of which is included in the present volume, he writes...
...from that tomb-like quality of the Collected Works of Dead Dull Author. There is not much point in printing selections from novels, and the poems are better forgotten. For the reader who knows Nakobov, Congeries is redundant; for the reader who does not, the many paperback editions of Nabokov are a better introduction...
Since the end of World War II, Saul Bellow has published a greater number of intelligent, relevant and stylistically superior novels than any other U.S. writer. The only other American novelist who could challenge that record is Vladimir Nabokov, who is a Russian aristocrat by birth and an expatriate U.S. citizen by choice. He is the greater artist, but he lives in an entirely different world of the imagination. Nabokov is committed to the American experience mainly insofar as it defines his own exquisitely tuned esthetic intelligence...