Aeternus

TIME BEFORE AND TIME AFTER IN NABOKOV´S NOVELS

I hesitated for a while if I should start these memoirs from the beginning or from the end, if I should first describe my birth or my demise (…)Properly speaking, I am not a deceased author (…) my tomb was my second cradle. Moses, who also wrote about his death, did not commence with it (…): a radical distinction between this book and the Pentateuch.

Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello offers a note on art as a window to the hereafter

LOLITA: FREUDIANS, KEEP OUT, PLEASE

Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello

I- Introduction

Nabokov was no music lover, but in his novels - and Lolita is no exception - he interwove several themes that intersected each other from back to front or from bottom to top, as if the melody and the structure of the story were employing a technique similar to that of musical counterpoint, instead of conforming to the synchronizing of plot and action. A love-story dissolves into another, Annabel Leigh... Lee...Loleeta, with a few variations, while a murder is announced in the midst of chases and flights that lead us back to the original theme.

MASCODAGAMA´S MANY-FACETED TRICKS

Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello,2005

“…only a white face with a trick mustache”

Aqua Veen[1]

I

Van was fourteen and a half when he joyfully exhibited his acrobatic talents during his cousin Ada´s birthday picnic in Ardis. His father Demon´s wrestling instructor, King Wing, had given him his first lessons and Van was a dedicated pupil. He wished to master some striking stunt that would give him an immediate and brilliant ascendancy in the eyes of his schoolmates[1]. (A,81) These were the initial days when Van and Ada fell in love with each other, and Lucette with Van. On “that summer afternoon, on the silky ground of the pineglade, in the magical heart of Ardis, under Lady Erminin’s blue eye, fourteen-year-old Van treated us to the greatest performance we have ever seen a brachiambulant give(…)Now and then, when he detached his organs of locomotion from the lenient ground, and seemed actually to clap his hands in midair, in a miraculous parody of a ballet jump, one wondered if this dreamy indolence of levitation was not a result of the earth’s canceling its pull in a fit of absentminded benevolence”. (A,82)

Está publicado na revista " Nabokov Studies", spring issue 2004.

http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/nabokov_studies/v008/8.1mello.html