Word: nabokovs
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...Shade's work: he has absorbed Kinbote's theories and has fashioned the commentary as an extravagant coda to his own poem. This kind of argument about a possible fiction within a fiction -essentially, the was-Hamlet-reallymad type of argument-may seem academic to all but Nabokov's most devoted readers. But it testifies to the extraordinary reality that Nabokov imparts to his artificial world...
Dotty Commentary. Nabokov's twin loves, says Field, are art and words. There are artists in virtually all his books, usually failed or mad artists. More often his heroes are demented chess players, professors, homosexuals, murderers. Writes Field: "Madness and art are always in each other's presence in Nabokov's prose," because the demands of art and life are incompatible...
Dappled Nouns. If art is Nabokov's muse, words are his mania: puns, anagrams (he has pointed out with glee that T. S. Eliot is almost "toilets" spelled backward), "word golf" (get from "live" to "dead" in five steps*), bilingual and trilingual double-entendres. More seriously, words of any language are vital possessions...
...poem, written in 1945, is a metaphor of Nabokov's career. It evokes the lost kingdom from which he was banished, the beloved words that can restore it, the mysterious agent of imagination that holds up the new material of life to the looking glass...
...first book, Andrew Field, 29, is himself a talented secret agent, tracking patiently through Nabokov's dreams and disguises, his ruses and games. His knowledge of Nabokoviana is awesome. Unfortunately, he is so awed by the master that he plays down his flaws and goes to ingenious extremes to explain away Nabokov's limited emotional resources or the coldness that occasionally turns high comedy into desolating farce. More important, he seems to lack breadth: it would have been good for the reader to find some comparison of Nabokov with such a contemporary as Isaac Babel, another great Russian...