VN up to his usual.
(Hurrah, we finally have internet in our new flat!)
I've just read Nabokov's Transparent Things, a novel, or novella really, from the 70s, a first edition of which I found in a weird secondhand-bookshop-cum-tearoom round the corner from me run by an old woman from Omaha.
I was sent on a massive word-hunt by this sentence near the end:
On the bedside table a new package of cigarettes and a traveling clock had for neighbor a nicely wrapped box containing the green figurine of a girl skier which shone through the double kix.
‘Kix’ wasn't in my 2-volume shorter OED, or in Chamber's, or in the various dictionaries of difficult words I have around the place. I had to wait for the nice man to install our internet connection and check the full OED online to find that it's a variant spelling (attested from the 17th-19th centuries) of a dialectal word kex.
The base meaning is of a dried, hollow plant-stem - Hardy uses it in Tess of the d'Urbervilles - but a rare and obsolete secondary meaning is of a ‘dry husk or outer covering’. Finally the meaning of Nabokov's figure of speech swam exhausted into view.
These explorations are part of why I love him as a writer, but sometimes the audacity takes your breath away - I mean that's obscure even by his standards.
Other words this short book taught me include impuberal, shippon, and tralatitiously. Good value for nine euros fifty, I reckon.
I've just read Nabokov's Transparent Things, a novel, or novella really, from the 70s, a first edition of which I found in a weird secondhand-bookshop-cum-tearoom round the corner from me run by an old woman from Omaha.
I was sent on a massive word-hunt by this sentence near the end:
On the bedside table a new package of cigarettes and a traveling clock had for neighbor a nicely wrapped box containing the green figurine of a girl skier which shone through the double kix.
‘Kix’ wasn't in my 2-volume shorter OED, or in Chamber's, or in the various dictionaries of difficult words I have around the place. I had to wait for the nice man to install our internet connection and check the full OED online to find that it's a variant spelling (attested from the 17th-19th centuries) of a dialectal word kex.
The base meaning is of a dried, hollow plant-stem - Hardy uses it in Tess of the d'Urbervilles - but a rare and obsolete secondary meaning is of a ‘dry husk or outer covering’. Finally the meaning of Nabokov's figure of speech swam exhausted into view.
These explorations are part of why I love him as a writer, but sometimes the audacity takes your breath away - I mean that's obscure even by his standards.
Other words this short book taught me include impuberal, shippon, and tralatitiously. Good value for nine euros fifty, I reckon.