Word: nabokovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...beaked American basso stirred his Milanese audience to excited whispers: "That's the son of Lolita." In fact, the new Don Basilio in The Barber of Seville could at best be ranked only as the fictional nymphet's half brother-the son of her creator, Novelist Vladimir Nabokov. But on his own merits, Harvard-educated Dmitri Nabokov, 27, a part-time mountain climber and amateur road racer, earned bravos from the discriminating Milanese gallery for his comic skill and the rich promise of his voice. Decided Father Nabokov judiciously as his Russian-born wife beamed approval...
...Troubles, Maud Gonne, had ended with her marriage to another man, the fortyish Yeats showed up in her home on the coast of France and promptly proposed marriage to Maud Gonne's eleven-year-old daughter, a scene that might bring pause even to the imagination of a Nabokov...
...uses them with care?"Idle roomers beget idle rumors"?preferring to play on people rather than words. For she is a devastating parodist, whether in a single line about "The Confessions of St. Augustine, as told to Gerold Frank," or in the full-sized parodies of Vladimir Nabokov ("To watch Lolita sit at the kitchen table and play jacks was to know what Aristotle meant by pity and terror"), or null Sagan: that timeless moment when the bored geriatric lover gets out of the bored hoyden's bed and hops up and down to get his circulation going...
Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokov. This revival of a prehumous (1938) novel, although a mere Pninprick compared to the author's subsequent slash, foreshadows the maturer talent in describing a middle-aged Berlin art dealer of The Blue Angel epoch, whose life and dignity are degraded by a woman...
Laughter foreshadows the mature Nabokov's brilliance and, compared with a lot of current fiction, is well worth reading. But what might have been searing in the book is somehow merely slick or shallowly cynical. Nabokov's gift for the vivid image is already sparkling, but his characters slip into caricatures. A tendency the later Nabokov has largely suppressed, of confusing imagination with prestidigitation, gets the better of him here, and the deftly manipulated mirror he holds up to nature reflects not life but simply more mirrors...