Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Idea: a novel in which all of the characters have been struck mute. The only way they can communicate is through the pictures and symbols on a pack of tarot cards. That seems the borrowed inspiration of a green writer who has been rifling Borges or Nabokov-a novelist who depends on conjury, not creativity. Yet the tarot notion comes from Italian Fabulist Italo Calvino, 53, who has been producing such chimerical conceptions in his books for over 30 years. What is more important, he has consistently fleshed them out in original, whimsical and unsettling ways...
...Greek poet Pindar (circa 500 B.C.) wrote an ode without using the letter sigma. Lewis Carroll, an Oxford mathematician better known for the Alice books, liked to mix the logic of numbers with the freedom of dreams. In this century, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings and Vladimir Nabokov all enjoyed the pleasures of arithmetic while exploring the peripheries of language. But it was not until 1960 that the newly formed OuLiPo officiated at the shotgun wedding of science and literature. Its first and still most remarkable product was Cent Milie Milliards de Poems (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), written...
Vonnegut's principal characters are Dr. Wilbur Swain and Eliza Swain, a brother and sister who seem to owe some of their identities to Vladimir Nabokov's Van and Ada of Ada. The aged doctor camps out in the lobby remnant of the Empire State Building and relates the disjointed fantasy of his life and times...
...Uses of Enchantment suggests utility over literary delight, therapy before amusement. Deep within the volume are less convincing "proofs" of this attitude. The legends of Snow White, of Hansel and Gretel, of Goldilocks are parsed for every psychological nuance. Here the reader leaves the nursery for what Vladimir Nabokov calls "the fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents." To Bettelheim, Goldilocks' peek into the bears...
...great poems, Wallace Stevens speaks of "musing the obscure." That phrase seems to be the unspoken motto of the Swedish Academy. Last week it again passed over such notables as Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene and Saul Bellow to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Eugenic Montale, 79, an Italian poet virtually unknown to the public outside his native land...