Volume 21, Number 19 · November 28, 1974
Nabokov's Touch
By V.S. Pritchett
Look at the Harlequins!
by Vladimir Nabokov
McGraw-Hill, 253 pp., $7.95
Strong Opinions
by Vladimir Nabokov
McGraw-Hill, 335 pp., $8.95
Among the many prestidigitating selves inside Vladimir Nabokov is a valet who can palm himself off on readers when the master grammarian is sleeping off his skills next door. As he has said, he 'has always been a conjuror: all art is deception and so is nature—see the butterfly mimicking the leaf.' So Look at the Harlequins! is the valet's fast-talking parody. He becomes Vadim—even Vadim McNab for a while, since Americans have difficulty with the two 'o' 's that follow—a Russian émigré aristocrat, quick to enjoy puberty, living briefly in Cambridge (Eng) and France, writing poems and novels—ghostly list of books supplied.
Review, 1340 words
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