Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0023622, Fri, 1 Feb 2013 21:09:01 -0200

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Re: fulmerlog:VN Sighting: Michael Chabon on Wes Anderson's
Nabokovian Worlds
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Juan Martinez has sent you a link to a blog: Chabon notes a Nabokovian impulse in the Wes Anderson's films: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jan/31/wes-anderson-worlds/

Jansy Mello: A very poetic rendering about the human experiences of loss, decay and the painful way towards wisdom and art as. seen through the eyes of M. Chabon, who easily glides from the "trick" performed by Joseph Cornell, or Vladimir Nabokov, to Wes Anderson's. He sees tham as artists who conquered the miniaturist's task of placing "the world into a box." .
a few excerpts ( January 31, 2013): "Vladimir Nabokov, his life cleaved by exile, created a miniature version of the homeland he would never see again and tucked it, with a jeweler's precision, into the housing of John Shade's miniature epic of family sorrow. Anderson[ ]-adopts a Nabokovian procedure with the families or quasi families at the heart of all his films, from Rushmore forward, creating a series of scale-model households that, like the Zemblas and Estotilands and other lost "kingdoms by the sea" in Nabokov, intensify our experience of brokenness and loss by compressing them. That is the paradoxical power of the scale model; a child holding a globe has a more direct, more intuitive grasp of the earth's scope and variety, of its local vastness and its cosmic tininess, than a man who spends a year in circumnavigation [ ] Anderson's films, like the boxes of Cornell or the novels of Nabokov, understand and demonstrate that the magic of art, which renders beauty out of brokenness, disappointment, failure, decay, even ugliness and violence-is authentic only to the degree that it attempts to conceal neither the bleak facts nor the tricks employed in pulling off the presto change-o. It is honest only to the degree that it builds its precise and inescapable box around its maker's x:y scale version of the world. "For my next trick," says Joseph Cornell, or Vladimir Nabokov, or Wes Anderson, "I have put the world into a box." And when he opens the box, you see something dark and glittering, an orderly mess of shards, refuse, bits of junk and feather and butterfly wing, tokens and totems of memory, maps of exile, documentation of loss. And you say, leaning in, "The world!"

Does Zembla correspond in any way to Nabokov's lost homeland and, in Pale Fire, will we encounter "a series of scale-model housholds that [ ]intensify our experience of brokenness and loss by compressing them"? I wonder.

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