"O’Donnell, Sylvia, nee O’Connell, born 1895? 1890?,
the much-traveled, much-married mother of Odon (q.v.), 149, 691; after marrying
and divorcing college president Leopold O’Donnell in 1915, father of Odon, she
married Peter Gusev, first Duke of Rahl, and graced Zembla till about 1925 when
she married an Oriental prince met in Chamonix; after a number of other more or
less glamorous marriages, she was in the act of divorcing Lionel Lavender,
cousin of Joseph, when last seen in this Index."
(Pale
Fire)
Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas, in Dublinesca (2010), describes
the mental and physical rambles of an ex-editor who is fond of quotations and
sees his life as a written text, called Samuel Riba.The editor-narrator has
decided to visit Dublin during bloomsday but he realizes that he's
forgotten the name of a bridge where a white horse is seen by every person
who crosses it. He checks it in his translation of Joyce's
Dubliners by Guillermo Cabrera Infante and finds out that, by a
misprint, the bridge is at first called O'Connell but next it
becomes O' Donnell. He now checks it in María Isabel Butler de
Foley's translation which only mentions O' Connell but where,
mysteriously, he is named Daniel O'Connell. One more trip to his
book-case and he gets Joyce's "The Dead" in which there is no
reference to Daniel O'Connell, nor any O'Donnell.
This particular item may have caught E.Vila-Matas's attention because he'd
read Nabokov's "Pale Fire" and still remembered a certain Sylvia née O'
Connell, later married to Leopold O' Donnell. By unfolding his search
by focusing on this particular item he'd be making a subtle reference to
Nabokov, along with James Joyce. However, only the author himself can confirm
such a conjecture. It's almost impossible that Nabokov would
have inserted a reference to Joyce's Dubliners at this point. Unless
there's a particular meaning, related to PF, that can be found in ... a
white horse?