Word: nabokovian
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...structural level is just where his language begins to break down. The thrill of the Nabokovian sentence lies in its intense compression, that hyper-compacted poetry of the apposite adjective or unexpected metaphor that separates it from the more loosely polemical Russian literary tradition. It’s why Nabokov adored Tolstoy’s taut prose and thought Dostoevsky a hack. In “Laura” this compression unravels—degenerating near the end into mere personal notes (“invent tradename, e.g. cephalopium”) and haphazard lists (drawing linkages between self-dissolution...
...Switzerland. The literary world at once divided in two: the “publish” camp happy to get their hands on whatever they could from the man they considered a genius, and their “perish” antagonists urging incineration lest any imperfection blacken the Nabokovian halo. One might assume that the recent green light points to some newly unearthed document or deep philosophical revelation. Not so. In an absurd introduction seeking to defend the decision, Nabokov’s son Dmitri waxes at turns cloyingly idolizing, stridently resentful, and distastefully self-aggrandizing in his memories...
...attempts to inveigle himself into the U.S. via the fictional Caspian splinter state of Absurdistan, only to get tangled up with the cynical local oil politics and the local dictator's foxy daughter. All the while he bemoans his fate with Nabokovian wit and efficiency--when he alludes to the "typical drabness of the one-room Soviet apartment, with the bulbous refrigerator shuddering in the corner like an ICBM before launch," you can practically smell the spoiled milk...
...most palpable biography" is his work, rang with disarming idealism. Nabokov must have been impressed and relieved; his disdain for the genre he defined as "psychoplagiarism" was well known. The acolyte was invited to the author's home in Montreux, Switzerland, where he took the inside track in Nabokovian studies and conducted the interviews that led to book No. 2, Nabokov: His Life in Part...
...most provocative territory in the Nabokovian universe remains the convolutions of the brain. In the final play, The Grand-dad, this century's refugees are replaced by a French nobleman whose good fortune helped him escape the guillotine in 1792. Decades later he runs into the frustrated executioner, now a senile gent determined to rectify the accidents of history...