![]() ![]() ![]() This baffling and brain-crushing conversation of two frivolous children smartly demonstrates that everything mocks everything else:īutterflies mock flowers and orchids mock butterflies Incidentally the other foot-the Pied de Lion from that poor little Christmas larch, is by the same hand-possibly belonging to a very sick Chinese boy who came all the way from Barkley College.” “You will be grateful,” she continued, embracing him, “for my not mentioning its scientific name. Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information (you recall Brown, don’t you, Smith?), has determined the example I brought back from Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot, B,E,A,R, my love, not my foot or yours, or the Stabian flower girl’s-an allusion, which your father, who, according to Blanche, is also mine, would understand like this” (American finger-snap). “I can add,” said the girl, “that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis that my mother was even crazier than her sister and that the paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is a perfectly recognizable reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California last February. Krolik, pour ainsi dire and that the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother.” “I deduce,” said the boy, “three main facts: that not yet married Marina and her married sister hibernated in my lieu de naissance that Marina had her own Dr. Paraphrasing his showy beginning of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Vladimir Nabokov lets us know that this ostentatious statement is just a hollow and preposterous generalization… Right away, with his trial balloon: “All happy families are more or less dissimilar all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” Vladimir Nabokov shows that his love story is a wicked and highly intellectual parody of everything, of all and sundry in literary world and especially of Leo Tolstoy with his disdainful arrogance of a falsely omniscient nobleman. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is a fabulous and fanciful amorous dystopia.
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