NPPF Comm 2: My bedroom, part 2

[Don Corathers]

Continuing.

p 109-110

"... His bachelor bedroom, a splendid spacious circular apartment at the top
of the high and massive South West Tower." This is the same room, Kinbote
confirms a few pages later, where the king was confined during the "tedious
and unnecessary Zemblan Revolution." And the room from which his father used
to slip away for greenroom trysts with Iris Acht.


p 110

"... a coverlet of genuine giant panda fur that had just been rushed from
Tibet... " Even in 1936 this must have been ecologically insensitive.

viola d'amore. [It., viol of love, ca. 1700] : a tenor viol having usually
seven gut and seven wire strings. (MW10)

"... Occasionally fishing out of the nether recesses of his seat a pair of
old-fashioned motoring goggles, a black opal ring, a ball of silver
chocolate wrapping, or the star of a foreign order." Lot of Daddy Alfin's
stuff down in that chair. Is any of it important?

"The sight of her four bare limbs and three mousepits (Zemblan anatomy)
irritated him... " Once again Kinbote tries to portray his distaste for
women as generally Zemblan, and does it with a coinage that perfectly
captures the king's revulsion at something most boys would be pleased to
see. Charles's rejection of Fleur contains another echo of Hazel, too: the
entire three-day seduction attempt can be read as a skewed replay of Hazel's
blind date.

cheval glass. a full-length mirror in a frame in which it may be tilted.

Sudarg of Bokay. A reflection of the name of a glassmaker we know, engraved
on the surface of a "really fantastic mirror." It is problematical that the
mirror was made for Charles's grandfather, presumably quite some time ago.
That would seem to make it impossible for our Jacob Gradus, born in 1915 and
just 21at the time Fleur gazes at her reflection in the mirror, to be its
craftsman. Perhaps it was made by his grandfather. Is Kinbote, the expert on
surnames who just a few notes ago was lecturing us about variants, unaware
of this reference to Gradus? He seems to be.

Whoever made the mirror invested it with magical power that not only directs
light but bends time: "a secret device of reflection gathered an infinite
number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful
groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual
nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they
were young--little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as
far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale,
and then nothing." Quite a mirror. Quite a paragraph.

putti. plural of putto [It., boy...] a figure of an infant boy esp. in
European art of the Renaissance--usually used in plural. The precise nature
of Charles's sexual interests becomes more clear.

Duchess of Payn? Anybody know where that duchy is?

1950 Exposition of Glass Animals. Another visit from Gradus, the glassmaker.



Line 85: Who'd seen the Pope (p113)

Interesting that Kinbote, who is not Catholic (see 'our Zemblan brand of
Protestantism," p 224) and has no reference materials at his disposal as he
writes the Commentary, has such an agile grasp of Vatican history.


Lines 86-90: Aunt Maud

I think this group is already a bit ahead of where the author expected his
readers to be at this point in plumbing Maud's eccentricities.

Don