Word: nabokovs
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...other assorted sexually deviant behavior, because of new revelations of the transgressions of Roman Catholic priests, have been firmly lodged in recent headlines. But this is well-trod terrain. Sexual deviancy has been covered extensively and credibly in Victorian scatological literature as well as and perhaps most memorably by Nabokov...
...Operation Shylock is not at all the desiccated exercise its premise -- doppelgangers, Identity vs. the True Self -- might suggest. The author admits that the subject of real or imaginary doubles has been pretty thoroughly and bookishly exhausted by everything from Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray to Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: "I knew all about these fictions about the fictions of the self-divided, having decoded them as cleverly as the next clever boy some four decades earlier in college. But this was no book I was studying or one I was writing . . ." Here...
...shelf includes Kafka, T.S. Eliot, George Grosz and the pantheon of Pop art, which emphasize chaos and mass hysteria in the modern age and the mob of mankind. This is the "No" that is countered by the affirmative "Yes" of Matisse, Lachaise, Brancusi and Delaunay, Joyce, Nabokov and Chagall, along with "Yes" shelfmates W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Richard Wilbur, Hemingway, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Mondrian, Brancusi and Alexander Calder...
Through the years, Duffy has interviewed some of the world's most revered cultural stars. "Vladimir Nabokov started out very formidable, asking for questions ahead of time," she recalls of a 1969 interview. "But once I traveled to Switzerland and saw him in Montreux, he was whimsical and utterly charming." In the world of ballet, a specialty of Duffy's, Peter Martins was "candid to a fault," while Mikhail Baryshnikov often offered "poetic responses" to her questions. Perhaps Duffy's secret is that she notices and records the variety in this world exceptionally well...
Like the author's previous The Russian Years, this concluding volume benefits mightily from the cooperation of Nabokov's widow and son. But their assistance should not overshadow biographer Boyd's ability to penetrate the mysteries of , the great novelist's art and life with uncommon insight and elegance. On his arrival in America, writes Boyd, Nabokov "would have to abandon entirely ((his)) hard-earned fame and to win respect over again from scratch, at midcareer, in a new language, at a time when to be a Russian emigre seemed deeply suspect to much of the American literary intelligentsia...