THE NEW REPUBLIC: a collection of
short-reviews (sent by Jim Twiggs)
1. January 26,
1942: Vladimir Nabokov's THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT"
The review offers a very superficial
overview of "the life of an English novelist... told by his
half-brother...with a brilliancy, a delicacy and a grave and exquisitely
venomous humor which make it a delight to read." and informs that both
boys "share the same father... a Russian officer of the old regime" and
that Sebastian's English mother has left her family on an
impulse. For the reviewer, the "book follows Sebastian with poetic passion
through his childhood in Russia, his education at Oxford, his love-affairs, his
literary career. To state that the facts of Sebastian Knight's life seem oddly
similar to those of Vladimir Nabokov's, and that it might be possible to
conceive of this book as a private individual's expose of his public self, would
be simplifying a matter which implies, but scarcely lends itself to,
simplification...."
Simplification is the word that describes the
entire article...
2. November 18,1972: Joyce Carol
Oates reviews Vladimir Nabokov's TRANSPARENT THINGS
Joyce C.Oates begins with "Invitation to a
Beheading," desribed as "a fine anti-Kafkan novel in which the good
guy was opaque, and the bad guys were transparent things" to contrast
this novel with "Transparent Things." For her, Nabokov seems to follow
the "oldfashioned view of the writer's proper relation to his characters is
that he must know everything about them," even if only a
selection of details are mentioned, before she adds: "Nabokov has always taken
that Godlike position toward his fictional puppets, and in this short novel—a
writer's highspirited vacation after the immense labor of Ada — it becomes his
basic theme. His all-knowing narrator, hovering high above the characters and
events, remarks on the difficulty of keeping to the narrative surface of things,
because things —including people —are like jars filled with their past
('transparent things, through which the past shines!')."
(Yes! Here Joyce C.Oates' sensibility renders.
in very few lines, one of the most catching images in TT, without dismissing the
complex implications related to them and such "transparent jars." After
all, transparencies are beautiful (spirals in a marble and stained-glass
windows, for example) and opacity is a menace, but a fundamental
right to entertain thoughts about transparencies.)
Joyce C. Oates notes that Nabokov's
narrator cannot "report only the present moment," so he risks
breaking the tension film that holds him on the surface. The story about a
pencil and its past now becomes " a minor Nabokov game of foreshadowing and
coincidence, involving a dull publisher's representative, a fantastic
German-American author resident in Switzerland, and one of Nabokov's
coldblooded, superficial women—like the hero's wife in Beheading."
Joyce considers that in this book narration
is the most important component and "it is bejeweled with sharply
focused details and acerb comments on life—an amusing evening's monolog by a
great writer on a postman's holiday."
3. June 2, 1973: Jonathan Yardley reviews A RUSSIAN BEAUTY AND OTHER
STORIES
The reviewer contrasts Jonathan Swift, "described as looking over a
copy of the 'Tale of a Tub' and sighing, 'What a genius I had then!'."
with most other artists who "tend to look at their youthful works with the
more jaundiced eye of a skilled craftsman appraising prentice work." Although he
sees Vladimir Nabokov among the latter, he thinks that he "rues his
early wares with a difference...He regrets primarily their disappearance into
the exile and oblivion of untranslated Russian Emigre periodicals." He
informs the readers that the present collection carries thirteen of
"Nabokov's and the century's 20's and 30's best stories." and mentions two
pieces, "Ultima Thule" and "Solus Rex," in particular, works "which he was
later to transmogrify into that complex marvel 'Pale Fire"[...] Another "curious
piece, 'The Circle,' "might be called a proletarian view of 'The Gift'."
In Yardley's quick outline we learn that "the other stories deal
especially with art, infidelity and mental aberrations." The reviewer
thinks that, compared with his novels "these are mere calisthenics,
perhaps; but remember the Russian gymnasts before you disparage mere
calisthenics."