Word: paling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...describing only the book's most superficial aspects. Long before he gets around to that, though, a suspicion has set in that the surface love story is as different from the real Ada as a bicycle reflector is from a faceted ruby. More even than Lolita and Pale Fire, Ada is studded with assaults and asides directed at literary forms, figures and fashions. Along with its masquerade...
...first fruit of that freedom was Pale Fire. Spectacularly unread, it made no concessions to popular tastes while proving that a genius can write a brilliant novel consisting of a 999-line poem and scholarly comment on it. The book is a wintry, touching parable concerning two of Nabokov's persistent themes?the feeling of being unloved and the horror of willfully inflicted pain. Pale Fire elicited the high-water mark of Nabokov's critical acceptance. Perhaps the most perfect tribute came from Mary McCarthy, a critic rarely given to generosity or overstatemeat: this work, "half poem, half prose...
...image. Yet, it bears little relation to the man today. Wolfe's features are those of one much older, an adult, in fact. They are sharply delineated as if fine pencil lines have been added to what had previously existed only as a rather rough cartoon. His hands are pale, they melt into his white suit. If it were not for his relaxed gestures, they might look like those of Uriah Heep. Although his hair--almost red--is moderately long, it too is very fine, almost thin. Wolfe's humor is casual, often offered only tentatively, yet with a certain...
Proclaiming no new doctrines and founding no new schools, I hit the last wall four hours later and proceeded to create stately, bold, blaring, cherry, apricot, pale gold, mauve, maroon, crimson, orange, cinnamon, whistling blue sails of forms. No gimmicks or gadgetry here, thank you. Carefully avoiding dehumanization and de-sexualization (in the painterly tradition), I strove to leave out as many myriad forms and colors as was possible. When finished, the wall seemed to cry out: "My name is Pat O'Connor-and goddammit, I can paint as well as Helen Frankenthaler...
...trips, Tommy had taken everything up to the road. Now the room was almost totally dark. We had found some tiny holes in the wooden ceiling, and it turned out that these holes were lights controlled by a dimmer near the door. We turned them on, and pools of pale light fell on the flagstone floor. No one spoke; everyone stared out the glass doors or at the floor or at nowhere in particular...