Word: nabokovs
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...movie version of Lolita is at this moment playing without any particular controversy in Moscow, former capital of hopelessly square Soviet socialist morality. After something like a year of relentless salesmanship, producers of Adrian Lyne's near reverent (but by no means inept or exploitative) adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's modernist classic has yet to find a theatrical distributor in the U.S., where, of course, morally ambivalent entanglements between older men and younger women have lately been hot news...
Only in the worlds of figure skating and Nabokov does the age of 17 seem old. But Michelle Kwan, all of 17 and already once an ousted champion, embodies fallibility and, yes, maturity as she crosses blades with her toughest competitor, Tara Lipinski, 15 (rid of her final baby molar only last year when she won the U.S. Figure Skating Championships). Hordes of sponsors and adoring young fans are choosing sides. Even bookstores are battlegrounds, with Lipinski's Triumph on Ice taking on Kwan's Heart of a Champion. A real showdown, though, took place last week...
...metaphors can be equine. She has said she is not a workhorse, not a racehorse, but a show horse. She brings up a fictional character who looked "impossibly sad, like a horse's eyes." It is a quote, she says, from Nabokov, and she pronounces the novelist's name correctly, with the stress on the second syllable, exactly as exacting old Vladimir used to instruct his readers. He might have been able to appreciate this latest of pop goddesses, this star of the Lilith Fair. After all, it was a Nabokov character who said that while he was capable...
...cover story in 1969, she interviewed Vladimir Nabokov in the Swiss hotel where he lived. Her description of the Winter Dining Room there was an early example of her keen eye: "a smallish chamber in the hotel basement, which, despite lavish importation of daffodils and red tulips, is a frightful miniature of desolation." That was one of many reports that caught the eye of managing editor Henry Grunwald, who promoted her to senior editor. "She dazzled us with her sheer intelligence and her gentle, ironic smile. We knew that we had a treasure in Martha and that...
...definitive novel on the chaotic collision between reader and creator remains Nabokov's Pale Fire. But Duncker, 45, who teaches at a Welsh university, turns Hallucinating Foucault into something more than an academic thriller. And the questions she leaves unanswered are of more than academic interest...