[NPPF] Canto Three: The British stuff.. hullo

[David Morris]

--- s~Z <keithsz at concentric.net> wrote:
> As the person, Hugh Person [...] extricated his angular bulk from the taxi
> [TT: p.3, Lines 1-3] (Hugh = Hue = Shade)

Well, no...  hue = color

But your connecting TT to PF seems promising.

http://people.bu.edu/chrlink/nabtt.html

"  When Transparent Things, Vladimir Nabokov's penultimate novel, appeared in
1972, critical reaction to the work was, at best, mixed and, at worst,
decidedly poor and even hostile. It is likely that many of the unusual and
innovative techniques employed by Nabokov in this late novel served to obscure
its merits among early readers. What appears, on a first reading, to be a
rather "light" affair (the book is only 104 pages), turns out instead to be a
dense and complicated work, fraught with ethical, metaphysical, and even
profoundly mythic significance. The book's poor initial reception--coupled with
its extreme (and misleading) concision--quickly relegated Transparent Things to
the status of an inferior, "minor" work. For all its brevity, however, the odd,
fascinating novella remains a deeply affecting allegory, rich in sophisticated
allusions and subtexts, pointing in new ways toward the same dark depths as
Nabokov's most important previous works. 

    The story of Transparent Things follows the oafishly clumsy, mostly
impotent, sleepwalking Hugh Person, whose name connotes, at least potentially,
the mythic universality of an everyman ("you, person"). Through a series of
a-chronological "flashbacks," the reader glimpses, in outline, the whole of
Person's pathetic life, distilled into a narrative with all the terseness,
strangeness, and existential wallop of a Kafka parable. From the novel's
opening lines to its infernal conclusion, peculiar voices intrude upon the
narrative. These puzzling, quibbling voices belong to characters that seem to
possess the supernatural capacity to see matter, objects, and incidents as
physically and temporally "transparent." Nabokov, exceedingly frustrated by his
"baffled" critics, publicly identified these peculiar commentators as
"ghosts"--a point now regularly noted, though rarely analyzed in much depth, by
critics dealing with the text. "



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