Word: prospero
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...route, some of the characters perish by fire, water and air?fleeting reminders of a return to elemental states. Age comes finally. Time reasserts itself. As the artifice is revealed, one almost expects to hear the snap of Prospero's wand. For this is Nabokov's autumnal fairy tale. Though not his finest book, it is certainly his most brilliant attempt yet to ransack the images and thoughts of his own past and shape them into a glittering now of the imagination...
...when a clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture of crude, lumpish evil-in-power, and he put Yeats' much quoted "rough beast" into a Bolshevik or Nazi Bethlehem. Thus Prospero-Nabokov always knew Caliban, whether he was known as Hitler or Stalin or by some other name...
...Never. Deep-dyed fatalism and the durable myth of Frankenstein surface from Durrell's dazzling assemblage. There are reams of the kind of beautiful travel and nature writing for which his Bitter Lemons, Prospero's Cell and Reflections on a Marine Venus have been praised. There are flashes of the ribald wit that makes his volumes about the British diplomatic corps such delights. But there is also much over writing. The book is littered with show-off phrases such as "alembicated piety" and "the penetralia of one's self-regard." The mixed metaphors are painful...
...that that passage began with the words, "Our revels now are ended." Which was all I had to say. My mind for the moment stopped, and it was only weeks later, seeing a transcript of what I had said, that I realized I did not in fact know how Prospero began that soliloquy. Not fortune, nor pain, nor yet the fiercest will could have wrung it from me. Only the realization of a youth having passed summoned it forth, which is to say summoned a power that was there but was not being used...
...fanaticism. She railed against his playing ball because it interfered with school and farm chores, tried to stop him from attending grownups' games for fear he would be hit by a foul ball. Luckily, Juan's older brother Gonzalo and his sister's husband, Prospero Villalona, were baseball nuts too. By the time he was nine, Juan could throw a curve (his lopsided, homemade baseballs wouldn't do anything else), and he quit school after the eleventh grade "because I was crazy about the game...