Word: nabokovs
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LECTURES ON DON QUIXOTE by Vladimir Nabokov; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 219 pages...
Master of nuance, connoisseur of transparent things, Vladimir Nabokov disliked the blunt instruments of art. "I remember with delight," he liked to say, "tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old book, before six hundred students . . ." Yet he lectured on the book at Harvard, partly because it was required reading but also because it struck some chord in the speaker. The lectures, reconstructed by Editor Fredson Bowers, disclose reasons for that resonance...
...Nabokov acknowledges, Don Quixote the novel may be flawed, but Don Quixote the man is permanent. The bony knight and his fat squire, Sancho Panza, are the most recognizable duo in all of fiction. The lecturer traces their "long shadow" through the works of such disparate men as Dickens, Flaubert and Tolstoy. Had he ventured only a little further, he might have found quixotic elements in the books of Saul Bellow, John Updike and Vladimir Nabokov...
There is a moment in one of Vladimir Nabokov's novels when the narrator sees a mirror being unloaded from a van on a street in Berlin. Suddenly the mirror, by a tilt of grace, becomes "a parallelogram...
...take on the male animal in her first form-fitted dress. "Lolita," she says, "was born decades later, yet [she was] a twin of the thirteen-and-a-half-year-old striding through Crotona Park, passing the spiky red flowers toward a kingdom of mesmerized men." The reference to Nabokov's lollipop avenger is especially suggestive because Simon's book is reminiscent of the Russian master's own recollections of childhood, Speak, Memory. Both books play magic tricks on time; both end with a voyage about to begin; and both leave the reader anxious to sign...