Word: trappings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...seem to be born with: the question of identity, the nature of reality, the task of the writer. Nabokov's treatment of these themes is idiomorphic; his form is flashingly and immutably his own. He is a Pirandellphic oracle in that he sees life as just one damned trap door under another...
Sebastian Knight, a novelist, has fallen through the last trap door, death. His half brother, the nameless first-person narrator of the novel, feels the loss like a psychic amputation. It is as if a great secret had been buried with Sebastian, perhaps the meaning of life itself. The half brother determines to ferret out the secret by reconstructing Sebastian Knight's life in a biography. His quest takes him to a college chum of Sebastian's at Cambridge who recalls a miserable emigre trying desperately to be more pukka than the sahibs. (Nabokov graduated from Cambridge...
...always year 1." There is the verbal clowning, e.g., "optimystics," "sexaphone." Wit and humor often sugar-coat horror in Nabokov's novels, but the poignance of exile haunts his pages like a vestigial memory of original sin. From Sebastian Knight to Lolita, Nabokov has sprung ever more fascinating trap doors, and his ambiguous hell, like Sartre's, has no exit...
This anguished quadrangle frames a landscape full of cactus and wild horses. Cowboy Blanding is a wild-horse wrangler on the side. He and some mercenary Indians trap mustangs and sell them for chicken feed. Business looks good when Blanding traps thousands of mustangs in a natural amphitheater; but he reckons without Stanley and Lark, who might have been the founding father and mother of the Walla Walla S.P.C.A...
This summer Cheng's Methodist friends had another mystery to ponder: strange bumping noises that came out of the deserted church by night. Early one morning last week a pair of private detectives, called in by Mr. Ransom, heard a trap door to the church attic slam. Together with Ann Arbor police, they climbed up, swept their flashlights about the attic. There, crouched above them in the rafters, was Cheng...