Word: paled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...PALE FIRE (315 pp.)-Vladimir Nabokov-Putnam...
From the entrance, the cathedral's dominant characteristic is simplicity. The ten pale grey, angled walls visible from the entrance are bare except for a simply inscribed rectangular Tablet of the Word on each of them. No windows can be seen, but the entire nave-from the dark marble floor to the fanlike tracery of the roof-is drenched with a multicolored light that draws the eye toward the altar and the huge Graham Sutherland tapestry (in color, opposite) that covers the north wall behind it. From the altar, the source of light is suddenly, almost theatrically apparent...
...acknowledgment as the cleverest writer is a touchy business, a little like becoming Pope - one must not campaign for the election. Readers of Nabokov's new book, which is surely the most eccentric novel published in this decade, have considerable reason to feel that the author is campaigning. Pale Fire, like Lolita, is a monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work whose verbal agility is often bewildering. But unlike the earlier book, Pale Fire does not really cohere as a satire; good as it is, the novel in the end seems to be mostly an exercise in agility - or perhaps...
...whose work I have seen so far at Harvard who uses color because color adds to the meaning of his picture; most use it because of all those pretty blues and reds which bear no relation whatever to what the photographer wants to say. Especially good is Talisman's pale and subtle Rouen street view, shot from a low angle to emphasize the cobblestones...
...average man, who obsesses authors with the similarities of his predicament rather than the individuality of his struggle. Many novelists nowadays tend to upend art to write about predicaments instead of people, but war novels and madhouse novels survive even this treatment. No matter how pale are a novelist's people, shot, shell and psychosis will set them off in a fascinating dance that closely resembles life...