the emigrants
"One of the shots resembled, even in detail, a photograph of Nabokov in the mountains above Gastaad that I had clipped from a Swiss magazine a few days before."
"A lenghty silence followed this disclosure before Mme Landau added that she had been reading Nabokov's autobiography on a park bench on the Promenade des Cordeliers when Paul, after walking by her twice, commented on her reading, with a courtesy that bordered on the extravagant."
"The air was coming in from outside and we were looking over the almost motionless trees towards a meadow that reminded me of the Altach marsh when a middle-aged man appeared, holding a white net on a pole in front of him and occasionally taking curious jumps. Uncle Adelwarth stared straight ahead, but he registered my bewilderment all the same, and said: It's the butterfly man, you know. He comes round here quite often."
"...When I asked why he had not appeared at the appointed time, he replied (I remember his words exactly): It must have slipped my mind whilst I was waiting for the butterfly man."
"He was carrying a large white gauze butterfly net and said, in an English voice that was refined but quite unplaceable, that it was time to be thinking of going down if one were to be in Montreux for dinner. He had no recollection of having made the descent with the butterfly man, though, said Ferber..."
"...He could not see himself again till he was back in the sudio, working at a painting which took him almost a full year, with minor interruptions -- the faceless portrait 'Man with a Butterfly Net'. This he considered one of his most unsatisfactory works, because in his view it conveyed not even the remotest impression of the strangeness of the apparition it referred to."
- Again, thanks to the NABOKOV-L forum for suggesting this book, which plays all sorts of shimmering Nabokovian tricks with time and the whims of fate (a little more malign but no less magical). A lot of understated echoes of Speak, Memory and Ada's "The Texture of Time" in here, and some not so understated. Good stuff.
Nabokovilia | Home | Index | Books | Resources | Tributes | Contact | Shop