I’d like to correct one more slight oversight in the citations I sent this afternoon.  Just a small typographic omission, but one that seems magnified since I am, after all, trying to cite VN’s own typographic precision and inventiveness: The Ada quotations are from part 5 of the novel.  My apologies—I’ll try to compose my subsequent emails for the list a little lest hastily!

Best,
Jacob Wilkenfeld

A few examples of the wonders which VN sets down within a set of parentheses:

“…and every time she glanced at his old hands (swollen veins, brown-spotted skin), clasped and twitching upon the handle of his umbrella, she felt the mounting pressure of tears.” –from “Signs and Symbols”

“Some of the spies are detached observers, such as glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions.”  -from “Signs and Symbols”

“…or the professional poet who embellished with his own inventions the dead and helpless author (whiskers here, private parts there) — a method that nicely camouflaged the paraphrast’s ignorance of the From language by having the bloomers of inept scholarship blend with the whims of flowery imitation.”  -from Ada, part 5, chapter 4, third-to-last paragraph

“…soon after my premature—I mean, premonitory—nightmare about “You can, Sir,” she employed mon petit nom, Vanya, Vanyusha—never had before, and it sounded so odd, so tend…(voice trailing off, radiators tinkling).  –from Ada part 5, chapter 6, first paragraph

“He moved closer and closer, sensing with his nape that the door had shut by itself, closer to the lithe concavity of her spine, to the gathers at her waist, to the lozenge-shaped checks of the cloth whose texture he could already palpate from seven feet away, to the firm, light-blue veins above the edge of her knee-high stockings, to the whiteness of her neck sheeny from the sidewise light next to her brown curls, which received another vigorous toss (seven-eighths habit, one little eighth flirtatiousness).”  -from The Enchanter, section 4, paragraph 9

“A short-legged, macrocephalous old fellow in an unbuttoned waistcoat—sluggish, dawdling, explaining at length and with guilty benevolence that he was only standing in for the owner who was his eldest son and who had had to leave to attend to family matters—searched for a long time in a black book, then announced that he did not have a free room with twin beds (there was a flower show in town, and many visitors) but that there was one with a double bed, ‘which amounts to the same thing…’”  -from The Enchanter, paragraph 22

“His bones were light and thin; his meek toe nails (you dear ones, you innocent ones) gazed up at him with childlike attention…”  -from Invitation to a Beheading, chapter 5, paragraph 21

Best,
Jacob Wilkenfeld