Two essays on drama highlight this rather marginal contribution to the Nabokov oeuvre—and Nabokov approaches theater in a dismissive, acerbic humor, much as he approached Russian literature in the recently published Lectures. Nabokov asks, conservatively, for the absolute retention of a single crucial dramatic convention, regarding spectators and the play onstage: "The first is aware of the second but has no power over it. The second is unaware of the first, but has the power of moving it. Broadly speaking, this is very near to what happens in the mutual relations between me and the world I see, and this too is not merely a formula of existence, but also a necessary convention without which neither I nor the world could exist." And, conversely, less persuasively, Nabokov sees tragedy—ever since Lear, Hamlet, and Gogol—as being hobbled by conventional cause-and-effect, deaf to accident: "What even the greatest playwrights have never realized is that chance is not always stumbling and that the tragedies of real life are based on the beauty of the horror of chance—not merely on its ridiculousness." The four plays here, however, embody Nabokov's rules-for-drama to, at best, a very limited degree. Two one-acters in verse—about Capt. Scott at the Pole, about a chance reunion between an executioner and one of his almost-victims—are thin and shapeless. The two longer plays, both set in Russian-ÉmigrÉ milieux, do illustrate a vaguely comic apprehension mixed with self-dramatization: the title drama concerns ÉmigrÉ fears about a possible Soviet agent; a comedy, The Event, involves a painter in fear of being shot once again by the man (his wife's ex-lover) who has already tried to kill him. Indifferent playwrighting, mildly provocative essays: a minor addition to the Nabokov shelf.
Pub Date: Nov. 21, 1984
ISBN: 0156569450
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1984
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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