Word: nabokovs
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Flaws v. Foreign. For next season, Papp has scheduled two plays by off-Broadway Negro Playwright Adrienne Kennedy, and has commissioned Negro Actor Ossie Davis and Composer Gait MacDermot to do a contemporary musical on the race question. "I also have," says Papp, "an adaptation of Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. But what I'm really looking for is American plays. I'd rather do flawed American plays than outstanding foreign plays...
...Nabokov lingers over the coincidence of the encounter, but his timing is nearly perfect. By drawing it out, he sharpens the anticipation of the impending adultery; before long, Martha, the frosty doll, and Franz, promoted from lifeless lump to "warm and pliant wax," can't get enough of each other...
...elaborate. Even Laughter in the Dark (originally published in 1932 as Camera obscurd), which in setting, plot and theme strongly resembles King, Queen, Knave, is more intricately patterned. But King, Queen, Knave is tricky enough-the ap-pearance-and-reality theme as applied to the eternal love triangle. In Nabokov's idiosyncratic geometry, all three angles are obtuse: Kurt Dreyer, fiftyish, owner of a prosperous department store, is suffused with a jocular egomania; Martha, his 34-year-old wife, beautiful and sybaritic, is dimmed by compulsively romantic restlessness and anticipation; Franz, Dreyer's youthful nephew and employee...
Dreyer and Franz occasionally attempt to squirm out of the two-dimensional plane in which Nabokov holds them captive. But most of the time, all three are as flat and glossy as the playing cards suggested by the novel's title. This enables Nabokov to give them the nimble shuffle that characterizes the mercurial plots of all his Action...
Here, as in Nabokov's more sophisticated novels, an important theme is the nature of fiction itself. By putting his comic trio through a series of abstract stances-a modification of the futurist and expressionist influences that swept the arts in the '20s-he never allows the reader to forget that fiction is essentially artifice. In King, Queen, Knave, the artifice may be a little too obvious, but intelligence and wit keep it working smoothly to the end. Nabokov himself could well have been thinking of this "bright brute" when he described a certain variety of butterfly...