Word: paled
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NABOKOV: HIS LIFE IN ART, by Andrew Field. Though his performance as critic is generally excellent, Field contributes mainly an engrossing review of Nabokov's entire career-in Russian and English-and finds the roots of such masterpieces as Lolita and Pale Fire...
...Virgin and her presentation in the temple, which until the 1930s hung in the Barberini Palace in Rome. Then one was acquired by Manhattan's Metropolitan, the other by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Now they are back together again, offering a double portion of the pale palette, polished perspective and high-waisted principessas painted by the anonymous 15th century artist known only as "the Master of the Barberini Panels...
...whole life," explains Tapies). Johns's Pinion is a prime illustration of Krzisnik's "alienation," since it literally depersonalizes one of Johns's zanier collages, which includes a wax arm and a ruler, by reproducing a ghostly, photographic image of it in watery red, yellow and pale blue, together with the grey smears of foot, hand and knee prints. Explained one juror: "Johns's subtlety in converting and sublimating pop elements exemplifies the harmonious reticence which is graphic art at its best today...
This theme runs through all his work but achieves its greatest expression in Pale Fire. The novel has two parts: a morbid autobiographical poem written by John Shade, and a dotty commentary by an admirer, Charles Kinbote. But is that really all there is to it? No, argues Field, who suggests that not only the poem but the commentary are Shade's work: he has absorbed Kinbote's theories and has fashioned the commentary as an extravagant coda to his own poem. This kind of argument about a possible fiction within a fiction -essentially, the was-Hamlet-reallymad...
...time when so many novelists are merely tinkering with far-out techniques or grinding out hunks of undigested raw material, Nabokov is an artist who fastidiously constructs intricate plots and dazzling verbal mosaics. He creates books without precedent in form (Pale Fire) or treatment (Lolita). He can also be a clever ice skater, stylishly tracing or following someone else's figures-the Conradian Laughter in the Dark, for example, or the Kafkaesque Invitation to a Beheading...