Word: nabokovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...protagonist. His most recent novel. If on a winter's night a traveler... is written in the second person, describing how "you," the reader, search for the lost ending of the novel If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino. More than any other novelist since Nabokov, Calvino breaks down the barriers between the novel and real life, not by making the story seem realistic, but by making reality seem like a book...
...practice has an unsettling side effect: careers can appear to run backward. The case of Italian Author Italo Calvino is instructive. His reputation grew from such cerebral narratives as Cosmicomics (1968) and Invisible Cities (1974); before long, Calvino's name was being bracketed between those of Borges and Nabokov in the fabulists' Hall of Fame. When Italian Folk Tales was translated and published in the U.S. in 1980, Calvino's exquisitely simple retellings of traditional material won richly deserved praise. Somewhat lost in the acclaim was the fact that the book, so different from the author...
...democratic Burgess incorporates most of the canonized major figures (Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, Hemingway), but he is in his gadfly glory when he argues for the underrated. At times he pays tribute to a neglected master like Joyce Gary, of whose The Horse's Mouth he writes: "Depicting low life, it blazes with an image of the highest life of all-that of the creative imagination." At other times he elevates a merely unfashionable craftsman like Budd Schulberg, for whose The Disenchanted he makes the dubious claim: "No fiction has ever done better at presenting the inner torments...
...artists in our century have won worldwide fame by creating works whose best-known image is the child as sex object. One was the writer Vladimir Nabokov; the other is the painter Balthus. He is the antimodernist's modernist. His retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris this past winter drew large crowds, and in a March auction in London, one of his paintings went for more than $1 million...
...stand in some inchoate manner for mankind, that abstraction imprisoned on "the crazy ball flying through space which if you care or have to think of it is an enormity verging on, no, surpassing outrage." At this level of ambition, The Paper Men invites unfortunate comparisons with Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, the best and funniest work yet on the usurpation of a creative mind. Golding's book cannot match the Nabokovian magic; it is a random collection of jigsaw pieces jumbled together from different puzzles. -By Paul Gray...