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Fw: Nabokov's "Colita," the tale of one man's obsession ...
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From: Sandy P. Klein
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Cc: cangrande@bluewin.ch ; chtodel@cox.net ; galya@u.washington.edu
Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2003 8:23 AM
Subject: Nabokov's "Colita," the tale of one man's obsession ...
This message was originally submitted by spklein52@HOTMAIL.COM to the NABOKV-L list at LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU. If you simply forward it back to the list, using a mail command that generates "Resent-" fields (ask your local user support or consult the documentation of your mail program if in doubt), it will be distributed and the explanations you are now reading will be removed automatically. If on the other hand you edit the contributions you receive into a digest, you will have to remove this paragraph manually. Finally, you should be able to contact the author of this message by using the normal "reply" function of your mail program. ----------------- Message
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/living/5024101.htm
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Posted on Sun, Jan. 26, 2003
Wicked, wacky send-ups parody the famous, infamous
Reviewed by William W. Starr
Copyright The State
THE SATANIC NURSES And Other Literary Parodies by J.B. Miller Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 235 pages, $16.95
J.B. Miller inhabits an alternate literary universe where "Vlad" Nabokov participates in a bowling league, where J.R.R. Tolkien makes late-night phone calls pretending to be a pizza deliveryman, where Joyce Carol Oates bartends (writing books between serving drinks), and where Raymond Carver and P.G. Wodehouse spend their hours drag racing on the Nevada flats.
By befriending these diverse literary sorts, Miller has been able to acquire - or steal or make up - various and sundry of their unpublished works.
In this hilarious book of parody, for instance, he lets us in on the secrets. Of Nabokov's "Colita," the tale of one man's obsession with a denture-wearing geriatric. Of Ernest Hemingway's "Hunting Tiger in Africa" in which a drunken Papa confuses Africa with Paris and shoots everything in sight. And of Frank McCourt's "Angela's Eyelashes," in which a sodden Irish boyhood leads to even greater degradations.
Here is Jack Kerouac's previously unknown description of life in New York, "On the Bus." Ronald Reagan's memoir of a first meeting with biographer Edmund Morris, a man of "encyclopedia ignorance." Lillian Hellman's "Implausimento." Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Nurses." Eve Ensler and Anne Rice's "The Vampire Monologues." And Cormac McCarthy's infinitely endless "All the Pretty Sentences."
You don't even have to be well read to savor these deliciously wicked parodies, but the more you know, the more you'll laugh. Miller has a whacked-out sense of humor attached to a slippery pen, and his work here - even with a minor slip or two - is more than clever.
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