Word: nabokovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Lolita. I've always wanted to see this ambitious version of the Nabokov novel, a film that doesn't get around much and that most people like a lot. Kubrick hasn't made very many films (this is one of his early ones), and whatever one thinks of 2001 or Clockwork Orange, he's always managed to come up with pictures really worth confronting. His range is phenomenal: he gave us the mythical war room of the Pentagon in Strangelove, for instance, and he was the first to visualize it for us. Now we take it for granted that generals...
LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS by Vladimir Nabokov. At 75, the old artificer has written a sly, funny fiction about an exiled Russian nobleman and novelist who resembles a certain writer with the initials...
...French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) came in impressive sequence, one surpassing another in virtuosity, like the work of a magician developing his craft, slow motion, before his audience. The Collector was a comparatively simple pass?butterflies in psychotic transformation turned into pinioned women, perhaps a gothic variation on Lepidopterist Nabokov. In The Magus, Fowles worked gaudier effects: allegory, romance, black magic. The French Lieutenant's Woman played the entire Victorian milieu against the 20th century; Fowles could so persuasively dream up another world that he was free to call all of it into speculation by proposing alternative endings...
...front, under the heading: "Other Books by the Narrator") are in the same category. They contribute to the sense of parody, the feeling that Vadim is an "inferior variant" of Vladimir, but aside from that they serve only as another vehicle for still more exercises of arcane wit. Nabokov aficionados will take pleasure in matching up these variant titles with the originals, or comparing, say, Vadim's precocious daughter with Nabokov's Lolita, but no real light is shed by the kind of wordplay that turns the real-life Camera Obscura into the fictional Camera Lucida, or by a stereotyped...
...Nabokov is a brilliant wordsmith and an impressive artificer. If that were enough, Look at the Harlequins! would be a very good book, and as it is, little nabokovs will find it entertaining and, often, funny. Others may find it empty--Nabokov's narrator takes a poke at "readers who are all head," but there is not much pleasure for the heart in this book...