Word: reader
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...from the first page, the reader is off fiction's flatlands into Nabokov's magic world. His aristocratic Fyodor is a lord of language, and this patrimony cannot be expropriated...
...language students, and menacing politics, as the Weimar Republic, "oppressive as a headache," clumsily snuffles toward its collapse. Fyodor's trilingual life enables Nabokov to play complicated games with the meanings of words. Fyodor is a poet, and without warning his thoughts run in poetic form; only the reader wary of Nabokov's incorrigible love of verbal conjuring will notice that whole pages printed as prose conceal rhyme schemes or blank verse and complicated prosodical measures...
...only listen"), part Lee Strasberg ("Become an animal; make the noises your animal makes; feel as it feels; think as it thinks; eat as it eats"), part Vic Tanny ("Hang a tether ball on a nail; punch it; punch, punch, punch"). She is a sort of Reader's Digest to the world's philosophies, dipping briefly into Zen, Yoga, evangelism, estheticism and existentialism. She dips as well, unfortunately, into sheer medical foolishness, instructs readers in search of momentary relief from irritation to plunge their faces into bowls filled with ice water, their legs simultaneously into steaming hot vats...
...various diversionary tactics to erase that haunting memory. "Blink your eyelids twelve times; yawn enormously-like a hippopotamus; notice four objects in the room; count ten hairs on your head-pull out three." "Attend Your Funeral" is designed for pure fantasy-indulgence, requires two solitary hours during which the reader is told to dream himself a guest at his own wake, checking to see who sent flowers and who showed up in person, listening attentively to the eulogy. Those who feel themselves particularly unloved are encouraged to "Attend Your Funeral Alone" to "give love to one who has forgotten what...
...Target is put together somewhat like a child's primer; printed in various type faces (recipes themselves are italicized, POINTS OF SPECIAL URGENCY set in bold capital letters), it affords the reader generous blank spaces where he is encouraged to scrawl his own reactions, such as, "I wish I had my money back...