Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LAYERS OF TIME turn translucent before us, Nabokov's own past comes shining through as well. All his favorite themes and fancies are here, each sketched out in a stroke or two. Butterflies (now obligatory in Nabokov novels) make their appearance high on a Swiss hillside. There is tennis, Nabokov's favorite sport. There are little games and word puzzles offering one verbal move after another...
...three years beyond the fullness of three score and ten, Nabokov has published Transparent Things, a slim silver volume beside Ada's black bulk, a novelistic speculation on art and time scarcely a hundred pages long. The new novel appears to take its departure from the "texture of time" section of Ada, perhaps even from the specific question asked there. "Has there ever been a 'primitive' form of Time in which, say, the Past was not yet clearly differentiated from the Present, so that past shadows and shapes showed through the still soft long, larval...
...understand Nabokov's peculiar conceit about time: he refuses to believe in the future or in a "flow" from moment to moment. We can sense the present and picture the past, but we can never prove the future. It is "but a figure of speech, a specter of thought." Some things are more likely to happen than others, to be sure, but none are certain. So the world of Transparent Things is revealed entirely in the present, but a present which is transparent to the past. The narrating guide instructs us how to approach this new mode of being: "When...
...RIGHT AWAY we slip through the present's thin veneer and are submerged in the whole history of an object--in this case, a simple pencil. The entirety of one of the earliest of Nabokov's brief chapters is devoted to illustrating the past visible in that anonymous pencil, from the grinding of its graphite and the felling of the pine for its case to the final implement, all in a discovered second of perception...
...inform its action things happen "as they do in one of R.'s novels." In the aging writer, writing on in the work of his creator, there is just a touch of self-parody, but a good deal more of sarcasm directed at critics who have falsely imputed to Nabokov several of old R.s' eccentricities, e.g., lusting after young girls...