Word: waltz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WALTZ INVENTION by Vladimir Nabokov. 1 1 1 pages. Phaedra...
...nameless European republic in the middle '30s, the play is about a madman named Salvator Waltz and his infernal invention, a machine which, Waltz insists, can produce at any distance an explosion of incredible force. Preposterous, snorts the Minister of War. Waltz obligingly blasts the top off a nearby mountain. Proclaiming an era of universal peace (and general slavery), he seizes the reins of government from the numbed fingers of a gabbling, gasping Cabinet, promptly mounts a demented reign of terror. He responds to an attempted assassination by blowing up a city of 600,000. Weary of ruling...
...verge of blowing the top off his accustomed world. But Nabokov has not simply satirized the pursuit of absolute pleasure and absolute power. His text is fretted with his customary puns, double-entendres, and literary allusions. More important, in the play's final scene Nabokov reveals that Waltz's demonic invention, and his successful rise to power, and-for all the reader knows-most of the fools, fops, frauds, pacifists, pederasts, know-nothings and impotents who people the play, have been merely the fantasies of Waltz's buzzing brain. This whole monstrous world, suggests Nabokov, is just...
...this century, every decade has had its city. The fin de siècle belonged to the dreamlike round of Vienna, capital of the inbred Habsburgs and the waltz. In the changing '20s, Paris provided a moveable feast for Hemingway, Picasso, Fitzgerald and Joyce, while in the chaos after the Great Crash, Berlin briefly erupted with the savage iconoclasm of Brecht and the Bauhaus. During the shell-shocked 1940s, thrusting New York led the way, and in the uneasy 1950s it was the easy Rome of la dolce vita. Today, it is London, a city steeped in tradition, seized...
...lived for 15 years with the man she is accused of murdering." Joyce asked Candy: "What really happened? Who do you think killed your husband?" Replied Candy: "I think it was one of those strange people he used to pick up on the street all the time. He would waltz into the house with strangers by the half dozen. He would tell people that we were very wealthy and important and owned a chain of banks and then say, 'Come on over and have a drink any time...