Word: palely
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Bend Sinister (1947), Puin (1957), Lolita (1958) and Pale Fire...
...Pale, pinch-faced little Jethro Furber, the nail-eyed reverend, was nothing but bones, and even those you could have wrapped in a hankie. His twisted figure was like a knotted string, and he hated his parishioners. With fierce Puritan intensity he preached burning, his whole inside crying die, shouting die. He worked in his garden obsessively, like a madman picking imaginary lint from his sleeve. He wanted women, imagined them in every posture. He wrote dirty doggerel and lied-his single skill. He lived in a thousand careening pieces, like a shattered army...
Could it be, Whitney wondered, that the unions have "concluded that they don't need us, that we are weak and not worth saving"? He did not deny that the Trib is financially weak indeed. "Maybe they think that in this pale stone," he wrote, "there is another drop to be squeezed out. There isn't. The newspapers of this city, for all the fact of the competition among them and the ancient work practices they are forced to follow, have the most expensive union contracts in the country...
...bang in the 1917 Revolution. Ever since then he has quietly taken refuge in an elegant, ironic domain of private jokes and personal fantasies. Lolita made him famous because the private joke was also a public one that millions found appalling or appealing. His other works (The Eye, Pale Fire, Pnin, etc.) have been more complex fantasies. One of them is this prophetic, satirical play, written in 1938 and now gracefully translated from the Russian by Author Nabokov and his son Dmitri. The reader can scarcely imagine its being successfully performed, but its characteristically savage humor and verbal inventiveness will...
...look down At the slum backyards frothed over with snow And think of the boy with the octopus brain Floating pale and wavy through The murky waters of Schopenhauer While your mother wheedled by the hour...