Discovery.

How slowly do the pages turn while reading Lolita for the second time! I now understand how someone can so easily slide into the enchanting abyss that Nabokov weaves for the reader.

As for a discovery? There are many, too many for the meager hours and days of this semester, so many that I must fight the fading line between interest and obsession. Oh well, I guess I won't fight it. Vladimir: the great Hunter, the great Enchanter. See what I mean? You can't escape it.


So, on page 10, in the same sentence, even, as the great aside (picnic, lightning) is another great one. I almost past it on the second reading like I had on the first. It is the next aside that caught my attention this time. The sentence now:

"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: ..."

Here is a great example of a Nabokoffian aside. Which is to say that though we have been trained to disregard information within parentheses, the readers' ears, mind, and memory should perk up at the sight of them. When H.H. says "if you can still stand my style" I now get the feeling as if that is a remark to the psychiatrists that are watching him. Remember on page 308 when Humbert says that he started the memoir 56 days ago under "observation" in the psychopathic ward.

In the second page of the novel, Humbert tells the reader that he is in some type of captivity while writing the story. And... under 'observation'... Humbert must be going crazy. This is of course what happens, but this first clue is written in a way (the "if you can still stand my style" to the doctors observing him, and the aside "I am writing under observation" back to the reader of the story) which a casual read doesn't quite reveal.

In the same sentence on page 308 Humbert claims that he is writing these "notes" for use at his trial, "to save not my head, of course, but my soul." Whoa. Quite the heavy purpose, writing to save the soul? And of course, Humbert immortalizes himself not in the words, but in the imaginations of his readers. There is much much more on this that will have to wait for another blog.

Lesson: close watch on those parentheses.