Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...portraying the events of a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin, it has comic exuberance, encyclopedic inclusiveness and a virtuoso display of diverse narrative styles that make most subsequent novels look like spin-offs. RUNNERS-UP One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov...
...understanding and faith in those qualities as well. The heroes not only defeated Hitler; they provided our lasting inspiration as well. "Just as Hitler made us believe we hadn't yet sounded the depths," notes Rosenbaum, "maybe Martin Luther King Jr. and the great artists of the century, like Nabokov, help us believe there are still heights we haven't found...
...guide for this trip (and I do mean trip) through history and literature is the eminent 19th-century translator of Russian literature Constance Garnett, whose unrelenting Englishness (read: priggishness) has been a scourge to modern translators from Nabokov on. Fashioned by Durang as a kind of Charles Kinbote for the entire Western cannon, Garnett is as much a mangler of Russian literature as a scholar of it. (The Russian word for frustrated homosexual is Peter Tchaikovsky, she says). Played with unrelenting and downright hysterical formality by Thomas Derrah, Garnett becomes as loveable as she is overbearing. Listening to her roll...
...making you expect "I had sex in an outhouse...when I was 12 I masturbated with a stapler" and so forth), and the other intellectual material is less than insightful. The most interesting article on the site at present: Dmitri Nabokov's essay on copyright laws and his father's Lolita...
...course, this too is fiction: a tribute to and ripoff of Nabokov. Pera gives Lo a younger brother, who died in a freak accident (tornado, live wire), and a lingering devotion to her dead dad, for whom Humbert is a sexier surrogate. Lo records scenes of innocent sapphic frolics, moviegoing (It's a Wonderful Life is about "how everything turns out right because the father didn't die after all") and quarrels with her bossy, desperate...