Word: nabokovs
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There are so many sparkling expressions in "first book of public prose" by Vladimir Nabokov that I have to give you some of them right away. Asked by an interviewer to comment on the recurrent linking of his name with those of Beckett and Borges: That play-wright and that essayist are regarded nowadays with such religous fervor that in the triptych you mention, I would feel like a robber between two Christs. Quite a cheerful robber, though. On Hemingway:...I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls, bulls, and loathed, it. Comparing...
...here" is not only the hotel in Switzerland where Nabokov makes his home, but the rarefied, almost Jamesian air of Meisterschaft which has grown up about him in the last few years. He is the one clear, current giant of our literature, I mean of American literature and English literature in general, and it is there, in language itself, that he has been most at home, since leaving Russia at 20, Western Europe at 40, and America for Europe again...
Literary Lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, 74, identified a unique American species, the Nymphet, in his 1958 novel Lolita. Although the work was internationally acclaimed, it failed to win any of the major American book awards. In fact, the Russian-born Nabokov, who is frequently mentioned as a potential Nobel prizewinner, has picked up few prizes; five of his novels have been nominated for National Book Awards, only to be ultimately passed over. Now the self-described "pleasant outsider" has landed one of the country's most distinguished prizes: the National Medal for Literature, awarded for a living American writer...
Died. Morris Bishop, 80, author of elegant light verse and urbane literary biographies (Pascal, Petrarch, La Rochefoucauld); of a heart attack; in Ithaca, N.Y. Bishop served 24 years as professor of romance literature at Cornell. In 1948, he persuaded the university to hire his friend Vladimir Nabokov, who settled in to write Lolita...
Also making a major appearance, as he did in a famous feud with Vladimir Nabokov, is Wilson the noble crank. Here he makes a dyspeptic but delightful attack on the cumbersome, pedantic paraphernalia assembled by the Modern Language Association (the college literature teachers' "union") to edit and publish classic American authors. The blame, says Wilson, goes back to "our oppressive Ph.D. system of which we would have been well rid if, at the time of the First World War, when we were renaming our hamburgers Salisbury Steak and our sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage, we had decided to scrap...