Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Great Stories. Another potential financial-windfall source for Nixon is, of course, the sale of his memoirs. One of the West Coast's top literary agents, Irving ("Swifty") Lazar, said that Nixon has signed a contract with him to negotiate with publishers. Lazar, 67, represents such luminaries as Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Irwin Shaw, Theodore White, Françoise Sagan and Billy Wilder. Lazar expects Nixon to write three volumes. The first will trace his life through his first term as President; the second will cover his foreign policy achievements and contacts with world leaders; the third will deal with...
Snakes and Parrots. Burke called his stories "tales" and had no illusion about their realism. In his Limehouse, Fu Manchu stalks opium dens; every flower girl has a "lily-white bosom" and is generally no older than 14-Burke seemed to have a pre-Nabokov feeling for nymphets. There are sharp krisses, malevolent white parrots and deadly snakes. It is, in fact, a never-never land that encloses the reader in a cave of such hypnotic mandarin prose as the following...
...what like Kawabata's other works in its disregard of conventional plot, proceeding back and forth across time only by a logic of association. It also possesses an uncharacteristic and rather clammy eroticism. In this claustrophobic reverie, Gimpei Momoi, a 34-year-old schoolteacher, a dim cousin of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, disconsolately follows women, or schoolgirls, through the streets. Filled with a "masochistic self-disgust" that has its origins in his own deformed feet, Gim pei (which might almost be some accidental translingual pun - "Momoi the Gimp") is another of literature's repellent voyeurs - a wincing...
...PASSION seems even more paradoxical because it lies under the cool formal surface. The formal tricks strain toward a big-league style that Roth simply does not possess--Roth seems to have been reading Nabokov. He includes a whole series of "found" documents. There are Tarnopol's writings, and within them letters, an article written by Spielvogel, a paper by one of Tarnopol's students, and a couple of strange memos commenting on Tarnopol's writing produced by none other than Lane Coutell and his wife Frances: Salinger's Franny has married her college boyfriend and both, thanks to Roth...
...Shenker never lets his light touch get our of hand, and he keeps a firm grip on even the most elusive conversation (Shenker's word games tend to be infectious). Suiting his style to subject, he rises to the sublimity of Vladimir Nabokov ("Q. What struggles these days for pride of trace in your mind?"), and caters to the acidity of Gore Vidal ("Have you read any bad books lately?"). Mark Van Doren's answers "seemed to demand the topography of poetry," and so Shenker has reproduced them in verse form. Only once, in an interview with Eugene Ionesco, does...