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Re: VN short stories (fwd)
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From: ValSyl@aol.com
I don't want to let this topic pass without weighing in with my favorite,
"Time and Ebb." This story contains a remarkable example of VN's skill with
the parenthetical phrase:
"(thus Richard Sinatra remained, while he lived, an anonymous 'ranger'
dreaming under a Telluride pine ... whereas everybody knew another Sinatra, a
minor writer, also of Oriental descent)."
Amazing. Richard Sinatra is a story in himself.
Also in "Time and Ebb"'s corner is a breathtaking evocation of VN's bicycle
motif (in the story's last paragraph) wherein the narrator's childhood is
personified as a a figure pausing on a bicycle to star up at a "warplane."
I've always been struck by this description's resemblance to a LO passage,
somewhere in the early chapters I think -- somewhere on the same page as
Ginny McCoo and other neighborhood kids. There's another LOishness at the
beginning of the story's second section: "My mother died ... I can only
recall her as a vague patch of delicious lachrymal warmth just beyond the
limit of iconographic memory." A fussier style for an older, stodgier
narrator, but any reader who knows "picnic, lightning" will recognize the
rest.
Then there's Professor Andrews, also starring in parentheses: "(I was a
man by that time and can well remember old Professor Andrews sobbing his
heart out on the campus in the midst of a dumbfounded crowd)." Has anyone
written on VN's use of parenthetical phrases? Or on bicycles??
Where "Time and Ebb" really rivets me, of course, is with its
themes of
obsolescence, the world passing out of our grasp, that which we now believe
revealed as false, and the McFated mystery behind it all, like the swans of
an unknown species in the story's final sentence. Pnin enjoyed the
expression, "story in a nutshell": I'd like to think that VN's nutshell is
here: "Attainment and science, retainment and art -- the two couples keep to
themselves, but when they do meet, nothing else in the world matters."
There is so much more that I love in this story! Just one more note
-- the narrator refers to his "brilliant but unpractical father" who has a
hard time keeping academic jobs. Son of Pnin? Or VN imagining DN at 90?
Musing like Sinatra,
Sylvia
Sylvia Weiser Wendel
I don't want to let this topic pass without weighing in with my favorite,
"Time and Ebb." This story contains a remarkable example of VN's skill with
the parenthetical phrase:
"(thus Richard Sinatra remained, while he lived, an anonymous 'ranger'
dreaming under a Telluride pine ... whereas everybody knew another Sinatra, a
minor writer, also of Oriental descent)."
Amazing. Richard Sinatra is a story in himself.
Also in "Time and Ebb"'s corner is a breathtaking evocation of VN's bicycle
motif (in the story's last paragraph) wherein the narrator's childhood is
personified as a a figure pausing on a bicycle to star up at a "warplane."
I've always been struck by this description's resemblance to a LO passage,
somewhere in the early chapters I think -- somewhere on the same page as
Ginny McCoo and other neighborhood kids. There's another LOishness at the
beginning of the story's second section: "My mother died ... I can only
recall her as a vague patch of delicious lachrymal warmth just beyond the
limit of iconographic memory." A fussier style for an older, stodgier
narrator, but any reader who knows "picnic, lightning" will recognize the
rest.
Then there's Professor Andrews, also starring in parentheses: "(I was a
man by that time and can well remember old Professor Andrews sobbing his
heart out on the campus in the midst of a dumbfounded crowd)." Has anyone
written on VN's use of parenthetical phrases? Or on bicycles??
Where "Time and Ebb" really rivets me, of course, is with its
themes of
obsolescence, the world passing out of our grasp, that which we now believe
revealed as false, and the McFated mystery behind it all, like the swans of
an unknown species in the story's final sentence. Pnin enjoyed the
expression, "story in a nutshell": I'd like to think that VN's nutshell is
here: "Attainment and science, retainment and art -- the two couples keep to
themselves, but when they do meet, nothing else in the world matters."
There is so much more that I love in this story! Just one more note
-- the narrator refers to his "brilliant but unpractical father" who has a
hard time keeping academic jobs. Son of Pnin? Or VN imagining DN at 90?
Musing like Sinatra,
Sylvia
Sylvia Weiser Wendel