Word: vadim
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...broke out caviar and champagne in honor of Deneuve's 31st birthday. Then the star settled down to read a batch of congratulatory telegrams. Among them was a sign of a hard-working actress's lot: telegraphed greetings from her children, Christian, 11, son of Director Roger Vadim, and Chiara, 2, daughter of Actor Marcello Mastroianni...
...broad outline, the narrator's life resembles the author's: When the Bolshevist revolution strikes, Vadim Vadimovich N finds it expedient to leave his native Russia; after a few years at Cambridge and a few in Paris as a writer-in-exile, he crosses the ocean to become a writer-in-residence at a prestigious Eastern university. The memoirs at hand dash through some fifty years, four wives, and a series of books (first in Russian and later in English) that correspond, more or less, to Nabokov...
Look at the Harlequins! looks most devotedly at the wives and the books, being at once a catalogue of Vadim's loves and "catalogue raisonne of the roots and origins and amusing birth canals of many images in my Russian and especially English fiction." We don't get a satisfying view, though. Wives and books--all, apparently, harlequins-- remain "outlines directed by reason" (to use the words of a younger Nabokov) seen as though through "the faceted eye of an insect." Vadim's wives are never more than shallow foils for his self-indulgence. One can't help suspecting that...
There are translation jokes: Keats' "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" goes through a Russian sieve and becomes "A pretty bauble always gladdens us." There is a half-hearted sort of dabbling with modernist experimentation: Vadim suspects that he is subject to the whims of a higher authorial power, and is bothered...
...references to Vadim's novels scattered like confetti through Look at the Harlequins! (the complete works are conveniently listed in the front, under the heading: "Other Books by the Narrator") are in the same category. They contribute to the sense of parody, the feeling that Vadim is an "inferior variant" of Vladimir, but aside from that they serve only as another vehicle for still more exercises of arcane wit. Nabokov aficionados will take pleasure in matching up these variant titles with the originals, or comparing, say, Vadim's precocious daughter with Nabokov's Lolita, but no real light is shed...