john updike

bech at bay
"These professional personalities operated at an energy level that stretched Bech's brain like chewing gum on the shoe of a man trying to walk away. Terry Gross, in her beguilingly adolescent and faintly stammery voice, had put it to him more brutally yet: 'How can you explain it? It must feel like a weird sort of miracle, I mean, when Henry James and Theodore Dreiser and Robert Frost and Nabokov didn't...'
"'I'm not a Swedish mind-reader,' was all Bech could manage by way of apology. 'I'm not even a Swedish mind.'"

bech: a book
"Reynolds, himself something of a spy, was with them whenever Bech spoke to a group, as of translateors (when asked who was America's best living writer, Bech said Nabokov, adn there was quite a silence before the next question) or of students (who he assured that Yevtushenko's Precocious Autobiography was a salubrious and patriotic work that instead of being banned should be distributed free to Soviet schoolchildren)."
"Her hands were as small as a child's, with close-cut fingernails and endearing shadows around the knuckles. He felt he had seen the hand before. In a novel. Lolita? The Magic Mountain?"
"He toasts Jack London, I toast Pushkin. He does Hemingway, I do Turgenev. I do Nabokov, he counters with John Reed."
"Gilman, Richard. 'Bech, Gass, and Nabokov: The Territory Beyond Proust,' Tamarack Review, XXXIII. (Winter, 1963) 87-99"

toward the end of time
"None of her children quite have Gloria's pale fire, though of course Marcia and Carolyn stir me a bit. They seem, for all the impenetrable grooming and manners, not quite content. Carolyn's paintings border on the pornographic, and Marcia has a childish streak that comes out in a startling baby voice, which I take to express, toward me, deflected aggression."

the coup
"We carried on with minimal toasts to the heroes of our respective races. 'Lumumba,' they would say, and I would answer, as their glasses were refilled, 'A Stakhanov.' 'Nasser, da, Sadat,nyet' was met, amid uproarious applause, with "Vivé Sholokov, ecrase Solzhenisyn," to applause yet more tumultous. My opposite number, Colonel Sirin*, who in this single installation commanded perhaps the equivalent in expenditure of the entire annual military budget of Kush, discovered that I comprehended English and, no doubt more coarsely than he intended, proposed honor to 'all good niggers.' I responded with the seventy-seventh sura of the Koran ('Woe on that day to the disbelievers! Begone to that Hell which you deny!') as translated into my native tongue of Salu, whose glottal rhytms enchanted the Reds in their dizziness."

Sirin means hawk in Russian, and it also happens to have been Nabokov's pen name during his emigré years. Updike, an avowed Nabokov fan, might be having a little fun with the name of a certain Soviet colonel in The Coup, or it might just be a coincidence. Regardless, this novel of African turmoil is perhaps this author's most explicitly Nabokovian effort -- it bristles with disguises and half-disguises, explodes with word-play and tri-lingual fun, detailing imaginary, oddly hyper-real facades, worlds within worlds. And at its heart we find a very Nabokovian exile/narrator, half charmer and half monster, whose name (again, in a most Nabokovian vein) is a delightful, heartbreaking pun. Thanks to the people at the NABOKOV-L forum for guiding me to this book (I'm working my way back with Updike, from Memories of the Ford Administration down and, what with this New England bard's fearsome prolificness, back up again.) More information on John Updike. Updike is simply amazing and with-it -- I'm often left dizzy by his attention to all the small things that whoosh by other writers. Also shocking is how sturdy his prose is, how beautifully it scans. Enough accolades. Did I mention how funny he is? How weirdly transcendent? How hip?
Many thanks to Aimee Morgan for the Bech: A Book reference and for providing the quotes, and to Bjorn Kruse for adding one more many years later.
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bech at bay "These professional personalities operated at an energy level that stretched Bech's brain like chewing gum on the shoe of a man trying to walk away. Terry Gross, in her beguilingly adolescent and faintly stammery voice, had put it to him more brutally yet: 'How can you explain it? It must feel like a weird sort of miracle, I mean, when Henry James and Theodore Dreiser and Robert Frost and Nabokov didn't...' "'I'm not a Swedish mind-reader,' was all Bech could manage by way of apology. 'I'm not even a Swedish mind.'"
bech: a book "Reynolds, himself something of a spy, was with them whenever Bech spoke to a group, as of translateors (when asked who was America's best living writer, Bech said Nabokov, adn there was quite a silence before the next question) or of students (who he assured that Yevtushenko's Precocious Autobiography was a salubrious and patriotic work that instead of being banned should be distributed free to Soviet schoolchildren)." "Her hands were as small as a child's, with close-cut fingernails and endearing shadows around the knuckles. He felt he had seen the hand before. In a novel. Lolita? The Magic Mountain?" "He toasts Jack London, I toast Pushkin. He does Hemingway, I do Turgenev. I do Nabokov, he counters with John Reed." "Gilman, Richard. 'Bech, Gass, and Nabokov: The Territory Beyond Proust,' Tamarack Review, XXXIII. (Winter, 1963) 87-99"
toward the end of time "None of her children quite have Gloria's pale fire, though of course Marcia and Carolyn stir me a bit. They seem, for all the impenetrable grooming and manners, not quite content. Carolyn's paintings border on the pornographic, and Marcia has a childish streak that comes out in a startling baby voice, which I take to express, toward me, deflected aggression."
the coup "We carried on with minimal toasts to the heroes of our respective races. 'Lumumba,' they would say, and I would answer, as their glasses were refilled, 'A Stakhanov.' 'Nasser, da, Sadat,nyet' was met, amid uproarious applause, with "Vivé Sholokov, ecrase Solzhenisyn," to applause yet more tumultous. My opposite number, Colonel Sirin, who in this single installation commanded perhaps the equivalent in expenditure of the entire annual military budget of Kush, discovered that I comprehended English and, no doubt more coarsely than he intended, proposed honor to 'all good niggers.' I responded with the seventy-seventh sura of the Koran ('Woe on that day to the disbelievers! Begone to that Hell which you deny!*') as translated into my native tongue of Salu, whose glottal rhytms enchanted the Reds in their dizziness."