Word: nabokovs
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Lolita. Wind up the Lolita doll and it goes to Hollywood and commits nymphanticide. Director Stanley Kubrick and Novelist-turned-Scriptwriter Vladimir Nabokov shadow the plot of Nabokov's perverse and remarkable novel rather faithfully, but they have filtered out its shades of meaning. Those who know the book will hoot at this decontamination; those who do not will be mystified as to how the story ever got its lurid reputation...
...ducks the duty of specifying Lolita's age and gives the part to a girl of 14 who looks a round 17. Making her movie debut, Teen-Ager Lyon is simply overmatched by the demands of her part. She acts knowing rather than sexy, and she lacks what Nabokov himself has defined as the "demoniac" essence of the near adolescent nymphet, an "elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm...
First he found his name listed on the program of a forthcoming Edinburgh writers' conference, then he got a letter saying that he was expected to appear. From his retreat at Montreux on the shores of Lake Geneva, Novelist Vladimir Nabokov, 63, sent his answer in the form of a letter to the London Times. "In the same list," said the strongly antileftist Russian émigré who left his homeland in 1919, "I find several writers whom I respect but also some others-such as Ilya Ehrenburg, Bertrand Russell and J.P. Sartre-with whom I would not consent...
Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. A monstrous, witty work of often bewildering verbal agility, in which a respected old poet is annotated to death by a lunatic scholar-or is he an exiled king...
Supporting this theory are the wealth of allusions that lead nowhere and the names that become meaningless anagrams ("Onhava," the capital of Zembla, becomes Navaho; ex-Zemblan can lead to dis-Zemblan, dissembler, resembler). Nabokov himself insists that "no book should ever have a deliberate message. It should be a combination of harmony and pleasure." If it is a key to a door, "the most important thing is for the key to work; it is quite unimportant what lies behind the door." Whatever meaning or non-meaning lies behind the door, any reader can delight in watching the greatest verbal...