Word: poem
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Thurgus the Turgid. Nabokov, of course, does this sort of turn spectacularly well. Solemnly the lardwit betrays himself, reporting that Shade's friendship "was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed." But as the reader reads Kinbote's line-by-line commentary on the poem, he sees that the annotator is afflicted with something more than boobery. Sanely or not, Kinbote has it firmly in his head that he is the deposed king of "a distant northern land" called Zembla, and that he was known to his adoring subjects as Charles the Beloved, son of Alfin...
Whenever he could get Shade's ear, he filled it with the romance of Zembla. But the poem, when it appears, is a sad, thoughtful intimation of mortality 999 lines long, focused loosely around the suicide of Shade's 23-year-old ugly-duckling daughter...
...runaway king here. This does not deter Commentator Kinbote, who charges darkly that Shade's wife blocked every mention of Zembla out of personal pique, and sets out to fill in the story Shade left out. Leaping with no excuse at all from inoffensive phrases in the poem, Kinbote plunges into lengthy accounts of the Zemblan king's idyllic boyhood, his pederastic youth, his glorious escape during the revolution, and the academic education that allowed the incognito expatriate to land a lecturing job at Appalachia University in New Wye, U.S.A...
...more troubling question is this: What did Nabokov have in mind when he wrote the book? Everything in it-and particularly the wiry elegance of the poem itself -denies the possibility that it is merely aimless entertainment. And although parts of the book are wickedly satirical of pompous emigres and academic wooden-heads, there seems to be no main target for the satire...
...image of an almost sickly sweet saint who slipped effortlessly through life. In his last novel, Greece's late great Nikos Kazantzakis has restored agony of soul to the story of St. Francis. Like Jesus in Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ and Ulysses in his epic poem, The Odyssey, Francis struggles to shed earthly desires for a harder, truer life of the spirit...