Re: Sarah Funke's posting on Robert Evans

> A lengthy anecdote "about a meeting with Nabokov, who was peddling the manuscript of Ada to Hollywood for a film adaptation. Evans read the manuscript twice through, during the night before his meeting, and he couldn't make any sense of it, so he passed on the project. He also talks about Laughter in the Dark as one of his favorite novels of all time..."

A snippet from the July '01 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's interview of B.R.Myers, author of "A Reader's Manifesto":

ADG: When you wrote that "we have to read a great book more than once to realize how consistently good the prose is ...": what book did you have in mind? The first book I thought of was Gatsby, which hasn't a word too many.

BRM:Henry de Montherlant said the main things a writer needs are the gift of observation and the gift of imagery. Nabokov displays both these gifts in Laughter in the Dark, but the story is so involving that you are barely conscious of his presence at all; instead, you see life through the eyes of a poet as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Today, needless to say, Laughter in the Dark is one of Nabokov's least-respected novels in the U.S.

Laughter in the Dark, indeed.

;D