Vladimir Nabokov on Jean-Paul Sartre

“It is hard to imagine (except in a farce) a dentist persistently pulling out the wrong tooth. Publishers and translators, however, seem to get away with something of that sort. ... Whether, from the viewpoint of literature, “La Nausée” was worth translating at all is another question.”

—from Nabokov’s review of Sartre’s “ Nausea ” (1949)

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[ Read scathing reviews from our archives of “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Lolita,” “Ulysses” and other classics that The Times panned. ]

Tennessee Williams on Paul Bowles

“It has been a good while since first novels in America have come from men in their middle or late 30s (Paul Bowles is 38). Even in past decades the first novel has usually been written during the writers’ first years out of college. Moreover, because success and public attention operate as a sort of pressure cooker or freezer, there has been a discouraging tendency for the talent to bake or congeal at a premature level of inner development.”