Dear Penny McCarthy,

You are not the first to speculate on the possibility that Van and Ada are not siblings. Claudia Ratazzi Papka came to that conclusion, and further deduced that the only true brother-sister relationship existed between Van & Lucette. She thought that it explained why Van avoided Lucette's bed & when Lucette was forced into Vaniada's, he was impotent with her.

I have given up trying to understand Ada, but I do have a few suspicions. One is that Van is the maddest of Nabokov's mad narrators. The other is that Van has doubled, redoubled and trebled so many times over any possible "reality" that lies behind it all, that I despair that it will be recoverable.

Charles Nicol in his article on Ada in Nabokov's Fifth Arc started down this path, but that was some years ago and the path seems otherwise abandoned.

I do have another suspicion that the key lies in that statement before the text of the book begins about Mr & Mrs Oranger. I discovered yesterday that her name, Violet Knox Oranger, appears also in the text of the book as a pun in a sentence (in Part V, ch 4) that like so many in Ada, doesn't make any sense:

Violet knocks [at the library door and lets in plump, short, bow-tied Mr] Oranger ... "

Carolyn

p.s. Violet's "doll eyes" also perplexed me yesterday (she is "an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes ...") and today I wonder if it links her to the two Dollies - - Tolstoy's and "Daria (1825-1870), daughter of Mary O'Reilly and Peter Zemski. Of course, she might actually only be a doll after all. Who knows!