Word: nabokovs
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...Vladimir Nabokov wrote a play called The Waltz Invention in 1938. More in the spirit of a dizzy gamble than of a calculated risk, the Hartford Stage Company has now given the drama its be lated professional world premiere. The play itself is deeply flawed, only fitfully flaring into zany, poignant and prophetic life. Though it will try some playgoers' patience and mystify others, admirers of Nabokov can scarcely fail to find it oddly fascinating...
...little like discovering the prehistoric ruins of a writer before he has built the edifices on which his reputation rests. One must bring to the play more than the play can possibly bring on its own: a knowledge of Nabokov's prevailing predilections. The most fundamental of these is that Nabokov has always regarded writing as an act of magic, of conjuring up rather than noting down, of producing totally unexpected rabbits from nonexistent hats...
...whom most people consider the most accomplished novelist in English, Vladimir Nabokov, will publish his first new book since Pale Fire. Called Ada, it is Delphically described by the author as "an attempt to grapple with the problem of time." Saul Bellow, the man whom most of the other people consider the most accomplished novelist in English, has a new novel too. Like his bestselling Herzog, it will deal with urban intellectuals, more than ever a promising subject since Norman Podhoretz's Making It made...
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...