…Robert Roper’s “Nabokov in America.” Roper, a novelist, non-fiction writer — and friend — is a great admirer of Nabokov’s (a secret he had kept from me for over 40 years). The merging of Bud’s talents as a writer (which I did know of) and his passion has produced a work enjoyable and informative from start to finish. I learned about Nabokov, his wife, their son. I learned about Nabokov’s friends and feuds, the butterflies he caught and the crafting of his career. I learned about the family’s cross-country trips, the America they prowled and the motor courts in which they rested and how this profited “Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” and more.
Robert Roper
I just finished…
…”The Savage Professor” by Robert Roper. Bud, as I have known him for 40+ years, has authored several fine novels and notable non-fiction works. This, his first crime thriller, concerns a world-renown epidemiologist, who returns to his Berkeley hills home to find the nude, dead body of a former colleague/lover in his bed. And that is only the beginning of his corpse-rich problems. The ride through them includes a flurry of jabs at Berkeley places, personnages, and lifestyle quirks, several grizzly desecrations, and a stirring knife — well actually scalpel-vs.-straight-razor — fight. When I singled some of the more gore-soaked moments out for praise, he said, “You know, some of my readers thought I overdid things there.”
When you are talking to a guy who was recently singled out to review “Tad Martin vs. Popeye Rape-Whistle In: The Secrets of Corpse-Fucking,” you are not going to have that as a problem.