Word: ada
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Some day Vladimir Nabokov may succeed in writing a novel that is impossible to review. Certainly Transparent Things, his first new work since Ada, would be easier to review for an audience that had already read it. Like the work of any great writer, the book is best enjoyed when read for the surprises in the story, the diaphanous beauty of the prose, the clear irony and humor. But Nabokov makes such a reading infernally difficult. He is not only writing his story but writing about writing...
...Vladimir Nabokov published Ada, his fifteenth novel. He was then 70. In his youth he had identified and attached his name to a new species of butterfly, created the first Russian crossword puzzle, and translated Alice in Wonderland into his native tongue. Later, in the thirties, under the pseudonym V.V. Sirin, he had written what many critics consider the finest Russian novel of the century, The Gift. In the fifties, with a book called Lolita, he had put the word "nymphet" into the dictionary. Ada's masterful complexity seemed a natural culmination to the long list of novels, stories, poems...
...three years beyond the fullness of three score and ten, Nabokov has published Transparent Things, a slim silver volume beside Ada's black bulk, a novelistic speculation on art and time scarcely a hundred pages long. The new novel appears to take its departure from the "texture of time" section of Ada, perhaps even from the specific question asked there. "Has there ever been a 'primitive' form of Time in which, say, the Past was not yet clearly differentiated from the Present, so that past shadows and shapes showed through the still soft long, larval...
...Dean Kilbridge's statement reprinted in The Crimson, "Critics are skilled, professional architects and out of Hosken's league," is contrary to fact and may be libelous according to my lawyers. Wellknown architectural critics, for instance, Mumford, Gideon, Ada Louis Huxtable (N.Y. Times), Wolf von Eckhart (Washington Post) don't have architectural degrees and have never practiced architecture at all. But since Dean Kilbridge makes value judgments about critics' qualifications and architectural qualifications one must ask: as a nonarchitect and with not published work as a critic is he qualified to make any judgments of this kind...
...onetime actor (The Cardinal), has written the screenplay from his own bestselling novel, The Other, a gushy gothic mystery set in the early '30s. The main characters are twin boys (Chris and Martin Udvarnoky), who fly about their New England farm playing magical games, encouraged by their grandmother Ada (Uta Hagen), a transplanted Russian who repeats adages like "God does not mean that we miss too much what he takes from us," and "As we came from the earth, so are we returned to it." Grandmother needs all her homely folk wisdom, for her daughter Alexandra (Diana Muldaur...