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...Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that the ideal reader for his books would be someone like himself, "a little Nabokov." There may never be one, for it would be hard to match him even in junior size. Besides being a scholar, critic, translator, chess player, lepidopterist and eccentric, he is one of those relatively rare writers who in the midst of their career have been able to alter the language of their craft. Above all, he is a unique artificer in the arid world of contemporary fiction...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Madness & Art | 7/28/1967 | See Source »

...time when so many novelists are merely tinkering with far-out techniques or grinding out hunks of undigested raw material, Nabokov is an artist who fastidiously constructs intricate plots and dazzling verbal mosaics. He creates books without precedent in form (Pale Fire) or treatment (Lolita). He can also be a clever ice skater, stylishly tracing or following someone else's figures-the Conradian Laughter in the Dark, for example, or the Kafkaesque Invitation to a Beheading...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Madness & Art | 7/28/1967 | See Source »

...Nabokov's achievements fully merit a major critical study. Andrew Field, a New Jersey-born critic now teaching Russian literature at the University of Queensland in Australia, microscopically analyzes all 15 Nabokov novels and the major short stories and poems, and traces Nabokov's abiding themes-love, death, exile and memory-through his Russian and American books...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Madness & Art | 7/28/1967 | See Source »

Novel of Prisons. As an exile in Germany from the Russian Revolution, Nabokov commanded a relatively tiny public in emigre circles. When he went to America before World War II, he painstakingly learned every nuance of English and translated his works back and forth in an effort to find a wider audience. He achieved notoriety before legitimate fame in 1958 with Lolita, and Field argues that the book, in which 42-year-old Humbert Humbert lusts for a child of twelve, would not have shocked nearly so much if readers had understood Nabokov's deeper preoccupations...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Madness & Art | 7/28/1967 | See Source »

Lolita, says Field, "is a novel of prisons." The idea for it came to Nabokov from a Paris newspaper account of a monkey who, "after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." Humbert Humbert is a prisoner of lust. He imprisons first Lolita, then his deadly rival Quilty. Later he writes his memoirs from prison. For Nabokov, the book's theme is love-and the necessity to liberate love from "its extreme and seemingly mutually exclusive opposite, lechery." Eventually...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Madness & Art | 7/28/1967 | See Source »

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