But they are also one of the problems: after meeting innumerable exotic characters, it dawned on me that the back-stories stand in for a story, and style stands in for emotion.
He played innumerable current-history characters in the radio March of Time, whose officials hailed his rendition of the death of Sir Basil Zaharoff as a truly remarkable characterization.
The overarching story is Bowman's, but the book has a wonderfully generous way with point of view, slipping fluidly from Bowman's angle to that of innumerable secondary and tertiary characters – his publishing colleagues, his in-laws, his lovers (even as they betray him), his writer and artist friends – sometimes for a sustained episode, sometimes just for a brief vignette.
Even in its innumerable variations, the deep and dark character stays intact.
The first reminds me of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, where through innumerable books and sexual experiences, the male characters never cease to lament their inability to understand women.
The character of Lolita, in her innumerable pop-cultural refractions (Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation is primary among them, but there are also a failed 1971 musical; a 1992 Russian-language opera; a second film, from 1997; a 1999 'retelling' from Lolita's point of view; and a recent one-man show), has come to signify something very different from what Nabokov presumably intended.
That it might be a gaming world version of a poorly plotted but stupidly explosive action movie, all ham-for-brains characters barking obscene non sequiturs and firing off innumerable rounds of ammo in the name of bringing about the end of some ill-defined but most-certainly-nefarious force of doom.
His best-known characters, the infant pranksters Max and Moritz, have spawned innumerable progeny down to the 21st century.
The character's problematic nature has lent itself to innumerable interpretations by actors and critics.
