Word: traps
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. A brilliantly clever arrangement of mirrors, trap doors and hidden staircases bamboozles readers, critics and perhaps characters in this thoroughly eccentric novel, most of which is in the form of a windy gloss of an old poet's last work, by an academic woodenhead who may or may not be the deposed, homosexual ex-king of a land called Zembla...
Eichmann, clad in brown slacks and a brown, open-necked shirt, took his position on a black-painted trap door beneath a beam from which a noose dangled. His arms were bound behind him, and he refused the proffered black hood. Face white, voice rasping, he sent greetings to his wife, his family and his friends. He repeated the essence of his defense: "I had to obey the laws of war and of my flag." As the noose was placed about his neck, the condemned man spoke his last words: "After a short while, gentlemen, we all shall meet again...
Seconds later, the Israeli warder called in Hebrew, "Mukhan!" (Ready), and then "Peheel!" (Action). The trap door fell open, and Eichmann's body, plunging out of sight into the room below, swung slightly at the end of the rope. The corpse was cut down, carried to a corner of the prison grounds where, in swirls of ground fog, it was thrust into an aluminum oven with a chimney at one end. A gas fire burned for two hours, reducing Eichmann's light frame to a handful of ashes. While the body was cremated, black smoke poured into...
...gets tired of decoration. Man is obsessed with himself." Few artists have more powerfully expressed on canvas the basic fact about man: that physically, at least, he is always dying, and that this is the great drama of his life. "I would like some day," says Bacon, "to trap a moment of life in its full violence, its full beauty. That would be the ultimate painting...
...seems possible that Pale Fire is a wonderfully funny trap for symbol simons, sex searchers and Ph.D. postulants...