Word: nabokovs
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KING, QUEEN, KNAVE by Vladimir Nabokov. 272 pages. McGraw-Hill...
This is Vladimir Nabokov's second novel, written and published in Russian in 1928, when he was a 28-year-old émigré living in Berlin. It was recently roughed into English by Nabokov's son Dmitri, then tightened and buffed to a cold brilliance by the author. "Of all my novels," says Nabokov, "this bright brute is the gayest. Expatriation, destitution, nostalgia had no effect on its elaborate and rapturous composition...
...Americans, meanwhile, have adopted comedy as their tool and social alienation and absurdity as their twin themes. Nearly every important American writer-Nabokov, Mailer Barm, Bellow, Malamud, Donleavy, Roth, Friedman, Burroughs, Heller, Pynchon, Willingham-works from an assumption that society is at best malevolent and stupid, at worst wholly lunatic. The gods are dead and their graves untended, morality is a matter of picking one's way between competing absurdities, and the only sane reaction to society-to its alleged truths and virtues, its would-be terrors and taboos-is a cackle or a scream of possibly cathartic laughter...
...graceful and superbly controlled, reveal an informed intelligence that can plunge unafraid into the rip currents of Vladimir Nabokov or write a better analysis of the nature of parody than the very good one that appeared as preface to the anthology he was reviewing. And it is somehow endearing to know that the same hand that wrote The New Yorker's sane, knowledgeable review of James Joyce's recently discovered fragment Giacomo Joyce, also turned out the epic 1960 farewell to Ted Williams, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu...
...state of culture," said Bly. "It turns out that we can put down a revolution as well as the Russians in Budapest, we can destroy a town as well as the Germans did at Lidice, all with our famous unconcern." For his hyperbole-the kind of thing that Vladimir Nabokov calls poshlost-Bly drew some expected cheers, and a resounding volley of jeers...