Word: nabokovs
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...LAYERS OF TIME turn translucent before us, Nabokov's own past comes shining through as well. All his favorite themes and fancies are here, each sketched out in a stroke or two. Butterflies (now obligatory in Nabokov novels) make their appearance high on a Swiss hillside. There is tennis, Nabokov's favorite sport. There are little games and word puzzles offering one verbal move after another...
...understand Nabokov's peculiar conceit about time: he refuses to believe in the future or in a "flow" from moment to moment. We can sense the present and picture the past, but we can never prove the future. It is "but a figure of speech, a specter of thought." Some things are more likely to happen than others, to be sure, but none are certain. So the world of Transparent Things is revealed entirely in the present, but a present which is transparent to the past. The narrating guide instructs us how to approach this new mode of being: "When...
...RIGHT AWAY we slip through the present's thin veneer and are submerged in the whole history of an object--in this case, a simple pencil. The entirety of one of the earliest of Nabokov's brief chapters is devoted to illustrating the past visible in that anonymous pencil, from the grinding of its graphite and the felling of the pine for its case to the final implement, all in a discovered second of perception...
...inform its action things happen "as they do in one of R.'s novels." In the aging writer, writing on in the work of his creator, there is just a touch of self-parody, but a good deal more of sarcasm directed at critics who have falsely imputed to Nabokov several of old R.s' eccentricities, e.g., lusting after young girls...
Freud has always irritated Nabokov, offended his deep sense of psychological subtlety. Here his satire of "the Viennese quack" and his "Sigmundian school" is refined into a brief parody of dream research. Of "some two hundred healthy jailbirds" investigated, "one hundred seventy-eight of the men were seen to have powerful erections during the stage of sleep called HAREM ("Has A Rapid Eye Movement") marked by visions and causing a lustful opthalmic roll, a kind of internal ogling...