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ur-Lolita connections (fwd)
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---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Tuesday, July 27, 2004 5:40 AM -0700
From: Brian Howell <fanshaw@123mail.org>
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Subject: ur-Lolita connections
------------------ I'm curious, too, to know what connections can be made
between the following passage in _The Gift_ and _Lolita_. The mention of
hunters who are to all intents and purposes enchanted here seems a nice
foreshadowing
of the later novel. I wouldn't be surprised if this excerpt has been
written about but I'd like to know if listers have any thoughts on it
anyway. Apart from anything else, like most of Chapter V of The Gift it
seems an outstandingly beautiful piece of writing and the subject matter
itself must have been pretty risque, too:
But sometimes, next to a school satchel and beside her shiny bicycle
propped against a tree trunk, a lone nymph would sprawl, her legs bared
to the crotch and suede-soft to the eye, and her elbows thrown back,
with the hair of her armpits glistening in the sun; temptations arrow
hardly had time to sing out and pierce him before he noticed, a short
distance away at three equidistant points, forming a magic triangle
(around whose prize?) and strangers to one another, three motionless
hunters visible in between the tree trunks: two young fellows (one lying
prone, the other on his side) and an elderly man, coatless, with
armbands on his shirt-sleeves, sitting solidly on the grass, motionless
and eternal, with sad but patient eyes; and it seemed that these three
pairs of eyes striking the same spot would finally, with the help of the
sun, burn a hole in the black bathing tights of that poor German girl,
who never raised her ointment-smeared lids.
(_The Gift_, pp. 305-6.)
Brian Howell
---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
D. Barton Johnson
NABOKV-L
Date: Tuesday, July 27, 2004 5:40 AM -0700
From: Brian Howell <fanshaw@123mail.org>
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Subject: ur-Lolita connections
------------------ I'm curious, too, to know what connections can be made
between the following passage in _The Gift_ and _Lolita_. The mention of
hunters who are to all intents and purposes enchanted here seems a nice
foreshadowing
of the later novel. I wouldn't be surprised if this excerpt has been
written about but I'd like to know if listers have any thoughts on it
anyway. Apart from anything else, like most of Chapter V of The Gift it
seems an outstandingly beautiful piece of writing and the subject matter
itself must have been pretty risque, too:
But sometimes, next to a school satchel and beside her shiny bicycle
propped against a tree trunk, a lone nymph would sprawl, her legs bared
to the crotch and suede-soft to the eye, and her elbows thrown back,
with the hair of her armpits glistening in the sun; temptations arrow
hardly had time to sing out and pierce him before he noticed, a short
distance away at three equidistant points, forming a magic triangle
(around whose prize?) and strangers to one another, three motionless
hunters visible in between the tree trunks: two young fellows (one lying
prone, the other on his side) and an elderly man, coatless, with
armbands on his shirt-sleeves, sitting solidly on the grass, motionless
and eternal, with sad but patient eyes; and it seemed that these three
pairs of eyes striking the same spot would finally, with the help of the
sun, burn a hole in the black bathing tights of that poor German girl,
who never raised her ointment-smeared lids.
(_The Gift_, pp. 305-6.)
Brian Howell
---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
D. Barton Johnson
NABOKV-L