#what writing a chapter for the sake of posting it rather than for the sake of finishing up a fic does to you 😔

[aromanticasterisms]

the epic highs and lows of rereading your own writing to seek out parts you disliked and analyze Why you disliked them to do better in the future

[vettelsvee]

GOODBYES ARE BITTERSWEET | Sebastian Vettel ✩₊˚.⋆ PART 5: I'LL NEVER LEAVE... NEVER MIND [PREVIOUS PART] [NEXT PART]

goodbyes are bittersweet masterlist | wattpad f1 masterlist | ao3 | ask anything or let's talk!

ferrari sebastian vettel x ex gf!female reader

word count: 4437

summary: after not seeing each other in almost five years, seb and y/n finally meet with just one purpose for her: telling seb they have a 4 year old daughter. will y/n be able to tell him?

warnings: mentions of sex. i think nothing else but i literally cried while writing this. i recommend that you listen to loml by taylor swift while reading this hehe

taglist: [ @saltycomicsanimalssalad @hc-dutch @mycenterfold @simplyamberj @spitesfvl-blog @jaydaaasworld @lottalove4evelyn @zoeyjadetice2010 @jehun @ferralari @cosmoscoffeee @mcmuppet @myescapefromthislife @sleutherclaw @youre-on-your-ownkid ]

a/n: i'm finally back! sorry you had to wait this long to get a new chapter but writers block had me going like crazy, as well as my mental health in general. i had something else planned for today BUT be aware of what I'm posting tomorrow since you might like it! christmas is coming soon and i have a surprise ready for you. let me remind you that feedback and reposts are truly appreciated. and also comment me your thoughts and theories on the story pls! missed you so much guys, thank you for everything, love you all <3

© VETTELSVEE (2024). please, do not steal, copy or translate my works. thanks for reading!

May 15th Heppenheim, Germany

“Y/N, remember that you need to be careful with what you say to Seb. I know you want to tell him about Emily, but also consider whether today is the right time. Imagine if…”

You stop listening to Hanna the moment her lips utter your daughter’s name. Instead, your mind started creating a thousand different scenarios about what could happen when you saw your ex-boyfriend today. Your gaze remained fixed on the mirror in your room.

You only returned home five days ago, but it felt like an eternity.

You knew perfectly well why, or rather, you knew perfectly well who was to blame for your distorted sense of time: Sebastian Vettel, of course.

The trip to London felt like a fresh start. While the main reason to go was your meeting with Capital Records to discuss what your near future might hold, you considered it as an opportunity to rethink what you wanted to do with your life from now on. 

You had just turned 30, and the only thing you longed for was to start this new decade with a clean slate in every possible way. That, of course, included facing your past mistakes and recognizing your faults, one of which you might be about to commit today.

Hanna acted as some sort of mediator between you and Seb because, no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t bring yourself to send him even the simplest of messages. The driver seemed to understand, as he told Hanna not to worry, that he understood, and that all you needed to do was show up without standing him up. 

Despite having agreed to meet at your house, you decided to dress up a little to present yourself in the best way possible. After spending far more time than you’d like to admit choosing what to wear, you settled on a light blue knee-length dress and white Converse sneakers, with a bracelet your daughter made (or better said your mother made, just Emily took credit for).

"Y/N, are you even listening to me?"

The reflection of your best friend in the mirror startled you. You turned towards her, trying to maintain the calm you’ve lacked since returning from London. Exactly five days that have felt like five years.

Like the five years since you last saw Seb.

"Hey, cat got your tongue or what?" insisted the blonde. "Seriously, Y/N, I want you to be speechless, but preferably when you and Seb take the conversation from the couch to the bed and he makes you scream his name again just like he used to do when..."

"Hanna, for God's sake, shut up! Seb and I are only going to talk about..."

"I know, I know, I was just trying to make you laugh. You know I like to..." 

Suddenly, the doorbell rang.

If you were restless before, pacing back and forth in your room, checking that there was no trace of Emily in the house for Seb to find, now you were frozen like a statue.

You looked at Hanna, and she looked back at you. You shrugged, but Hanna just put her exaggeratedly unfriendly faces.

"Hanna, no..."

"It's Seb, Y/N! It's just Seb, for heaven's sake," she interrupted, and you cut her off just as fast.

"It's the Seb I haven't seen in five years!" you stammered, feeling the anxiety taking over. "Seriously, Hanna, this was a very, very bad idea. I don’t even know why I asked you to tell him to come and..."

"Because he's the father of your daughter, and your only goal is to tell him!" she yelled, trying not to raise her voice too much but failing miserably. You hoped to God Vettel didn’t hear that.

"Hanna..."

"Since I know you're not going to open the door, I'll do it myself. Stay here or come down, do whatever you want, but I'll tell Seb to come find you because clearly, you can't handle welcoming your guest," she declared.

Without saying anything else, she strided out of your room. You could only follow her, practically tripping down the stairs, legs trembling like a teenager on her first date. Your pulse was pounding in your temples, while your mind kept screaming at your body to calm down.

As soon as you stepped onto the ground floor, you saw Hanna opening the door. Her cheerful voice broke the silence, asking Seb how he was and, to your surprise, inviting him in.

You inched closer, not quite enough for them to notice you. Then you stopped, inspecting Seb from head to toe, as if you didn't already know every inch of his body by heart. Even though you were used to seeing him on TV and social media daily, it felt like you haven’t seen him in all this time you’ve been out of touch. He was wearing a slightly worn-out white t-shirt and jeans. His hair was perfectly trimmed, though a bit longer on top, and his beard, probably several days old, was what caught your attention the most, looking just the way you liked it.

But what really captivated you was the bouquet of yellow tulips he was holding, just like he used to bring you for dates or whenever it was a special day for either of you back when you were dating.

You swallowed hard, guilt washing over you as you thought, for a fleeting moment, about him handing you a flower bouquet before you told him you were having his baby.

"Hi..."

You thought your whisper was too soft to be heard, but it was quite the opposite.

Both Seb and Hanna turned to look at each other, then focused on you, still standing in the entryway. Your best friend tensed up slightly, but you tried to reassure her with a slight movement of your hands. The expression on your ex-boyfriend’s face seemed to light up at your small intervention, even if it was minimal.

“Well, Seb, I'll leave you with Y/N. I have a few errands to run…” Your friend tried to excuse herself, though both of you knew it wasn’t true. “See you later for a drink guys!

She winked and quickly slipped out, shutting the door behind her before either of you could even say goodbye.

Now, it was just the two of you, alone.

Seb looked at you again, and you couldn’t help it but get lost in the blue of his eyes. The situation felt strange. You used to cherish every moment of being alone together, but now you didn’t even know how to say a simple "hello." 

You once trusted him completely, and now you were unsure whether to offer him a drink or tell him that you have a four-year-old daughter.

“Hi, sunshine,” he said, breaking the silence.

“Hi, Seb.”

He took a step towards you, slowly moving closer. You noticed how his gaze shifted from the flowers to your eyes, as if he was searching for some kind of answer from you. His eyes reflected a mixture of nervousness and tenderness, stirring a whirlwind of emotions inside you. 

He didn’t have to say it, you could see it in his eyes. He was afraid of how you’d react to this gesture, this little detail that used to drive you crazy, but now… you didn’t know how to feel about it.

You, on the other hand, were utterly stunned. 

How, after all this time and how cold you ended things, could he still do this? How could he still remember?

“These... are for you,” he finally said, his voice low and shaky. He handed you the bouquet, his hands trembling.

You met his gaze, and the way he looked at you was filled with fear, insecurity, and maybe, just maybe, a bit of tenderness. He didn’t need to say it out loud because you knew him too well. He was afraid of how you’d react to this gesture.

“Thank you,” you managed to say, taking your time to smell the flowers.

You couldn’t hold it in. Tears began to blur your vision, and a wave of embarrassment washed over you.

He noticed. Even though you didn’t want to, even though you didn’t feel capable of getting close enough to give him a kiss on the cheek or maybe even a hug, Seb did it anyway.

“It's okay, Y/N,” he whispered. “It’s okay...”

But it wasn’t okay… it was far from okay.

Sebastian Vettel was here, once again, standing in front of you, and possibly back in your life. The boy you once considered your best friend, the best friend you fell in love with, the driver you always supported, and most importantly, the father of your child, was back in your life in such an unexpected way that it still felt surreal.

“I don’t know...” you tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out. “It feels surreal that after everything, after such an empty goodbye, here we are, together again,” you confessed. “It’s weird seeing you in front of me in the flesh and not as pixels on a screen.”

“Y/N…”

“I’ve missed you, Seb. So much.”

You knew your honesty didn’t catch him by surprise, because he felt the same way. That’s what hurt the most.

“I missed you too, Y/N. I really did...” he said after a moment, wrapping his arms around you, and you pressed your face against his chest.

“Seb…”

“Don’t overthink it, really,” he interrupted gently. “I’m not here to talk about the past or blame anyone,” he paused, letting out a breath before continuing. “I just want us to go back to who we were before we were together. But, if I’m being honest, we’ve been in love with each other for so long that I can’t remember a time when you weren’t my everything.”

Your lips trembled. The weight of his words was too much for you to handle, at least today, in a first encounter where you haven’t even spent ten minutes together.

You felt awful. You felt shattered inside knowing that if you were in this situation, it was because of you.

“Well, Y/N, tell me…”

“No, no,” you quickly interrupted, grabbing his arm and guiding him to sit on the couch. Immediately after, you rushed to the kitchen to grab the drinks and snacks you spent all morning preparing. “You tell me first. Even though I’ve seen you on TV, I know you’re very private about your life, you know... You never share anything with the media, and well, you don’t even have social media so… How are you?”

He let out a short laugh as he picked up a bottle of water and a cheese-and-salmon toast.

“Well, to be honest, I’m doing much better than when you left me,” he revealed. It didn’t surprise you. After all, it was what you expected him to say. “You must have had your reasons for breaking up with me, and after all these years, I’m not going to ask why you did it. But I won’t lie to you… you left me shattered, Y/N.”

“Seb, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“I know,” he cut in softly, making a gentle gesture with his hand to calm you down. “Like I said, I’m not looking for an explanation or an apology. I just want you to know how I felt. Mentally… damn, Y/N, you broke me, and I completely lost myself, but at the same time, that’s what gave me the strength to win the championship in 2013,” he looked away from your eyes, shifting his gaze to the wall. Nervously, he started playing with his fingers. “All I could think about was you and that, maybe, there was a chance you were watching...”

“Of course I was, Seb,” you said softly, trying to hold back the tears and keep your composure. “No matter what happened, I never stopped watching or supporting you. I’ve always been, and will always be, your number one fan.”

He nodded, a bittersweet expression crossing his face.

“That year, everything I did was with the thought in mind that you were watching and, somehow, it helped me move forward. But… 2014 was when everything fell apart,” he admitted. “Red Bull wasn’t the same anymore, or at least, I didn’t feel the same way. I wasn’t winning, Daniel was beating me… I felt like I had lost everything, including you and, with time, I started to feel like I had no reason to stay with the team or maybe even in Formula 1. Until Ferrari offered me the contract.”

You remembered it like it was yesterday. Unlike any regular sports fan, you found out through Heike when you were out for a walk with Emily.

“When I was given the chance to sign with Ferrari in 2015... Y/N, really, that’s when I realized it wasn’t the end. That’s what I needed to move forward. I think I mentioned it to you on WhatsApp, but I don’t know if you remember…”

You swallowed hard. Of course, you remembered. He told you just before the news became public, before his mum told you, but you didn’t know how to answer him or if you really should do it. The demons in your head made you think it was a joke, even just an excuse to get closer to you. And you also felt that if he did sign with Ferrari, it would open a door you had closed because you weren’t ready to face the truth.

Just like you were doing now.

“I remember, yes,” you murmured, unable to look him in the eyes.

“When I didn’t get a reply from you I decided not to push it. That’s when I realized you didn’t want anything to do with me. Yet I kept sending you stuff as you might know…”

“That’s not it…” You could barely speak. You were as broken as he was. “I read the message, Seb, but… I burst into tears and didn’t have the strength to reply. I didn’t want to give you false hope when I wasn’t ready to… I didn’t want to hurt you more than I already had,” you confessed. “I knew that if I spoke to you again, I’d hurt you again. And I’d hurt myself too. I couldn’t do that to you, Seb.”

He nodded, looking for some kind of affirmation in your gaze.

“At first, I felt really out of place on the team, you know? And I felt that way for a long time,” he revealed. “It was completely out of my comfort zone, and I felt like I’d never fit in. But little by little, Kimi, Maurizio, and the team made me feel like family. It’s strange to think about it now, but I can’t imagine being with any team other than Ferrari.” You agreed with him, from what you had seen on TV, it was clear he felt that way. “Fighting for the world title with them this year and having a real shot at beating Mercedes… I never thought I’d get to this point.”

You looked at him with a mix of admiration and nostalgia. This was the Seb you knew, the Seb with ambition, who always desired more and more. The Seb who never gave up.

The Seb who didn’t break down, even when he had every reason to.

“I’m so proud of you, Seb. I’ve always been, and I always will be. Don’t forget that.”

“Of course, Y/N,” he looked uncomfortable. Quite a bit, actually. “Well… enough about me. You know I don’t like talking about myself… What about you? What have you been up to all this time? My mom told me a bit, and I’ve seen you a few times, but…”

More than not knowing what to say, you sensed he didn’t want to intrude too much into your life.

You swallowed, trying not to get more nervous than you already were, because now, you supposed, was the moment to tell him about Emily.

“Well, not much has changed, really,” you started, unsure of what to say. “I’ve been in Heppenheim the whole time, except for a couple of trips to Berlin, but nothing unusual,” you tried to smile, but your mind kept circling around the fact that you had to tell him you had a daughter. “I’ve been working at the bar and writing music. To be honest, since we broke up I’ve had a lot more inspiration.”

And since I gave birth to Emily, you thought.

Seb didn’t say anything. You figured he understood. After all, he had thrown himself into his career to cope, while you had poured your emotions into writing songs about the story you shared to cope with grief.

“Now things have changed a bit,” you continued, trying to sound more upbeat to push away the painful memories. “Ever since Red went viral… I swear, I uploaded it without expecting anything, but the reaction…”

“The song is amazing, Y/N. Of course it went viral.”

“I’ve been offered a record deal,” you blurted out. “A few years ago, I met Niall Horan at the bar. You know, the guy who was on that band, One Direction…” Seb nodded, his eyes wide, encouraging you to continue. “He told me he was traveling to find some inspiration for his solo career, and I guess Heppenheim seemed like a good place for him to visit.”

“Wait, wait… a record deal?”

“Apparently, Niall told his label that I was the voice behind Red, and, well… Capital Records offered me a contract,” you explained. “They called me to have a meeting in London, which is why we couldn’t meet up last time…”

His face was calm, unreadable, though his mouth had curved into a big smile. He didn’t seem surprised, and you knew there was a strong chance Hanna had told him everything.

If that was true…

“I hope you accepted, Y/N.”

“Well… actually, I didn’t. I turned it down.”

His smile faded for a moment, and his expression became completely serious.

“You turned it down? Why? Sunshine, this is an opportunity…”

“Yes, I know it’s an amazing opportunity, but I can’t accept it. Not right now.”

You figured this was the moment you should tell him the real reason behind rejecting such a big deal, which included a tour if you sold a certain amount of CDs.

Sebastian kept staring at you, which only made you more nervous. You tried to gather your thoughts, searching for the right way to tell him you had a four-year-old daughter, but you couldn’t find the moment.

You couldn’t just drop it on him now, after all, this was your first real conversation in almost five years.

“Y/N, darling…”

“I can’t take the risk when the only thing I’ve managed is to get one song out of all the ones I sent to the label to go viral,” you half-lied. It was true that you didn’t want to talk about it yet, but you were also insecure about your music. “As much as I’d love to have an album, to fill stadiums and have people singing along to my songs, I can’t take that risk.”

“But, Y/N…”

“I’m not sure all the songs on the album would be successful, Seb.”

“Y/N, you have no idea what you’re going to regret if you let this go....”

“No, Seb, I know exactly what I’m doing, really,” you shook your head, firm in your decision. “This is the best thing for me.” 

And for Emily too, though you didn’t say that out loud.

Seb remained silent for longer than you would have liked, as if trying to process what you’d just told him. Then, he stood up, crouching down to your level, and taking your hands in his, he said:

“Alright. If you think your songs aren’t good enough, sing one of them to me.”

“What?” you asked, confused.

“If you turned down the record deal because you think your songs aren’t good enough for the world to hear, sing one of them to me.”

His tone, though calm, was direct and insistent.

“Seb… I can’t. I’m too embarrassed,” you laughed nervously.

“Come on, Y/N,” he said, gently rubbing your hands with his thumbs, just like he always did when your anxiety was at its worst. “It’s just me. I’m still the same after all these years.”

You sighed, knowing he wasn’t going to let it go until you gave in. It was Seb, and he always got what he wanted from you, even when you didn’t want to. In the end, you gave in, carefully standing up from the couch and heading towards the piano at the back of the room, gesturing for him to follow you.

You carefully slided the bench back, lifting the lid as you sat down. You positioned your hands, starting to play the first few chords to warm up, ensuring your memory flawlessly recalled the piece.

“This is song number 5, like your driver number... It's called loml.”

You continued playing, finally giving way to the song.

Who's gonna stop us from waltzing   Back into rekindled flames?   If we know the steps anyway   We embroidered the memories   Of the time I was away   Stitching, ‘We were just kids, babe.’   I said, ‘I don't mind, it takes time.’   I thought I was better safe than starry-eyed   I felt aglow like this   Never before and never since.

Your voice shook as you began to sing, but you kept going, holding on to what your ex-boyfriend had told you about how he knew it was about him. As you settled into the song, you started feeling more comfortable, just like you did when you used to sing for Seb. Though you couldn’t look at him because you were absorbed in the key, your fingers delicately moving over it, you could feel his eyes on you.

You shit-talked me under the table   Talking rings and talking cradles   I wish I could un-recall   How we almost had it all   Dancing phantoms on the terrace   Are they second-hand embarrassed   That I can't get out of bed?   Cause something counterfeit's dead.

Tears started falling from your eyes as you approached the final part of the song. Memories of your shared history flashed through your mind like a movie. Your vision was completely blurred, and you felt a tightness in your chest that was overwhelming, making it hard to breathe, almost impossible to keep singing. Somehow, though, you fought to hold it together, just as you did the day you said goodbye to the man now sitting beside you.

Oh, what a valiant roar   What a bland goodbye   The coward claimed he was a lion   I'm combing through the braids of lies   ‘I’ll never leave’... ‘Never mind.’   Our field of dreams, engulfed in fire   Your arson matches your somber eyes   And I'll still see it until I die   You're the loss of my life.

Silence filled the room as you played the final notes. With your hands still resting on the keyboard, you looked at Seb. Once again, you didn’t know what to say to him, and you knew he didn't either. He was motionless, running a hand through his hair, probably trying to process what he just heard.

Y/Ni, this song... it’s about us, isn’t it?”

“It might be,” you admited, unable to lie to him, at least not about this.

He sighed. You could tell he was affected; you knew it the moment his tears began to form, just as yours continued to flow.

“You should rethink the contract,” he said firmly. “This song deserves to be heard by more than just me, your parents, and Hanna.”

“I can’t, Seb. I just can’t…”

“Can I sit next to you?”

You looked up and saw him gesturing to the bench. Confused, not sure what to do or say, you shifted a little, making space, and he sat beside you. Seb didn’t hesitate to wrap an arm around you, offering a comfort that felt wonderful but also caused you to crumble a bit more inside. 

You surprised yourself by resting your head on his shoulder.

“Why are you so determined to convince yourself you don’t deserve this opportunity?” His tone was soft, just like the way he stroked your hair. “Do you really think you're not good enough to be a successful singer?”

“It’s not about being good enough, it’s that I’m not,” you whisper,ed your throat tightening. “I’m not a good person, Seb, and it’s only a matter of time before I screw up again and hurt someone, just like I hurt you.”

“Does this… have something to do with the second date in your YouTube channel username?”

You stood your head up, staring at him in confusion while trying not to panic.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your username,” he repeated, moving closer. “I figured out that the numbers represent two dates. I know for sure that one of them is June 15, 2006, the day we started dating, but the other one… I don’t know what January 12, 2014 means for you because we weren’t talking by then, but it must be important. And based on what you just said…”

Your eyes widened in shock. You were paralyzed, not knowing how to react. 

How could he have noticed something so… insignificant? How had he connected the dots and figured out the dates you had in mind when you created that account?

You thought this would be the perfect moment to tell him that the second date marks the birth of your daughter, the daughter you had together; that on that day, while you were in labor, he was at the hospital waiting for some exams results and he was talking to your dad, who couldn’t contain his excitement about his granddaughter’s arrival and had to keep it a secret from him.

But you couldn’t. Not yet. You need to regain his trust first. You and Seb needed to rebuild the kind of relationship you had before you became the love of each other’s lives.

“Seb…” you trailed off, unable to continue. “I swear, on everything that matters to you, I’ll tell you, but right now… I just can’t.”

He looked at you for a few seconds that felt like an eternity. You knew him better than you knew yourself, and you knew he was persistent, that he needed an answer, but you also knew he was respectful and wouldn't push you.

“That’s okay,” he said finally, a bit resigned. “I understand, it’s fine. I’m not asking you to tell me now if you’re not ready, but I want you to know that when you are, I’ll be here to listen.”

You looked at him, grateful, and nodded without saying anything else. 

You both sat at the piano bench for a while, in silence, listening only to the sound of your breathing and the melody of the song replaying in your mind, as intrusive thoughts overwhelmed you.

“If I waited almost 19 years of my life to be your boyfriend, I can wait a little longer, it doesn’t matter the time you need, for you to tell me,” Seb finally spoke, and his words broke you a little more than you already were. “Let’s be friends again, what do you think?” he offered, giving you a small smile. “Let’s take things slowly, like maybe we should have done when we first started dating. You know…”

“Slowly, no problem,” you repeated, smiling back at him.

You felt a weight lift from your shoulders at his words. Maybe you were not at the peak of your relationship, and maybe you’d never got back there, but at least you were working together to turn your story into something new.

“You know what, Y/N? I’ve always felt like our story wasn’t over. I don’t just mean that romantically, but in a broader sense,” he said quickly. “We have a whole lot of history, and now is when we’re going to start writing our second book.”

“I know, Seb. I’ve been thinking the same thing ever since I said goodbye to you,” you confess. “That day, goodbyes were bittersweet, but I knew it wasn’t the end and that I’d see you again.”

Before the year ends. I’m telling Seb Emily is her daughter before December 31st.

[meanbossart]

I'm not sure if it's been asked before but first of all your writing skills are just incredible🤌 After reading "A Novel Experience" it was like scratching an itch that I couldn't quite reach after years of reading burnout. In summary I was genuinely interested in how have you improved and developed your writing skills? Like honestly your writing is so addictive and captivating that (respectfully) there just has to be some kind of exposure to expression through literature, or perhaps you are just simply into reading. (That's a lot of yap and sorry if it's personal in a way or another. Also thank you for inspiring me and other people alike, you are a phenomenal artist 🙏)

Oh, thank you! I am beyond flattered and I truly appreciate that you enjoy my writing so much. To be honest I am actually very dissatisfied with my work for about half of A Novel Experience - when I started it, I had no audience, I just wrote and posted the first chapter as an epilogue for the game since the canonical ending felt pretty abrupt (we didn't have the official epilogue with the extended dialogue or Wither's party back then).

Then, I just felt like I had more to say, so I kept writing and by chapter 4-5 I had this huge story plotted out. I wrote a lot of those early chapters very quickly, and often while a little drunk, and considered them rough outlines rather than a finished work. When the story and my art began picking up traction I started to put more effort into my style and presentation, which is why chapters take a LOT longer to write nowadays - but I can confidently say that I am very proud of everything that came after The Compound.

I'm not really a reader, I'd be surprised if I read more than 30 books in my entire 28 years of life, and frankly I only started to enjoy fantasy very recently through admiring many of the fromsoft games from afar, and of course by finally playing Baldur's Gate 3.

One thing I will say is that the fictional books I've read that really stuck with me - and that I would consider to have influenced the way I write - have all had very unorthodox styles. Blindness by Jose Saramago is page after page of overwhelming walls of texts that read like a slowing-down clock or an agonizingly tight turning of screws; Blood Meridian is a nearly incoherent babble written by a man who outgrew the need or patience for commas or proper sentence separation, who knowingly disregarded grammar for the sake of feel. The Consumer is a collection of borderline pornographic and horrible, horrible stories where every character is abstracted into a wider social phenomenon, point of view is irrelevant and there is no line between narrative, dissertation, or poem.

Unlike the aforementioned works and their authors, I'm not talented (or crazy) enough as a writer to COMPLETELY forego construction and grammar, but I do feel perfectly confident in prioritizing feeling and flow over what is "correct" and experimenting with text in the same way I would on a drawing. I don't think any of this makes me good at it, but hopefully it makes it interesting or unique enough to stand out. It also means that, despite disliking those first few chapters, I don't really mind having them out there, since my purpose with them was to just have fun and try to capture "a vibe" rather than show myself off as some sort of wordsmith.

Well then, I've definitely outyapped you so we're even now. Hopefully this was interesting in the slightest!

[shinwonderful]

Freedom of Choice

prologue to Heavy is the Heart (That Wears the Crown) [masterlist coming soon]

part of you hoped you'd be able to avoid this aspect of royalty, but it was inevitable. they would never allow the sole heir to the kingdom of evermoor to remain unmarried. all you can hope for is that one of the suitors you meet will be the true love you've always dreamt of.

⁺✦ seventeen x reader (cyoa style!) ⁺✦ word count: 3.3k ⁺✦ genre: historical, kind of a mix of everything lol ⁺✦ warnings: shitty parents, forced marriage, mention of being pressured into intimacy, i promise i'm not a royalist i just think historical stories of nobility are v romantic

જ⁀➴┊ [🐈] happy valentine's day!! this series has been in the works since november, and i'm so excited to finally post the prologue! this series has come to be very close to my heart, and i'm really excited to share it with you guys!

special thanks to @lovewithoutresin my beautiful bestie for editing and writing the dialogue for the reader's Handmaiden! I love that this series has a piece of you in it too MWAH!!

the prologue and a certain upcoming chapter are dedicated to the lovely @ylangelegy for inspiring me to pick up writing (on tumblr) again after nearly a decade (christ alive i'm old. 💀). if they hadn't been so supportive and expressed interest in this story, i'd likely not have written it. happy valentine's day ilysbbbb

dividers by saradika!

each chapter of this series will have a (relatively lol) period-accurate theme and costume.

this chapter's theme is Fauré: Après un Rêve (ca. 1870).

"A song about devotion and passion. The dreamer yearns for the return of her dreams, in which she met her love: ‘In sleep made sweet by a vision of you’."

the costume for this chapter is this gorgeous afternoon dress (ca. 1835) from the met museum archives.

“All we ask is that you keep an open mind.”

The rattle of the carriage wheels against the meticulously hand-paved road beneath your fancifully cushioned seat was, perhaps, the only thing keeping you grounded at the moment. You could do little but curse them internally, knowing putting up a fight was… tragically futile.

“How do you mean, Mother?”

You already knew the answer to this question, but it bought you a bit of time to school your reaction, to use your decades of lessons in decorum to keep your actual thoughts and feelings from clawing themselves out of your mouth.

After all, for God’s sake, how could they expect you to choose a husband on this supposed ‘diplomatic tour’?

You’d, of course, rolled your eyes when your Handmaiden had told you of their plans (though a much more tumultuous emotion stirred behind your sardonic response). Your parents hadn’t even afforded you the courtesy of a conversation before making arrangements for the tour. Instead, the news was broken only after your Handmaiden heard the rumors in whispers that echoed through the long, hollow halls of your castle. (Pro Tip: Having a best friend on your staff never stops being helpful.) You knew what this was, and it wasn’t simply diplomatic. At least, not in the usual sense.

You knew what this was– everyone did. You were of the age where courtiers began to whisper about your lack of husband, gossiping about why the Crown Heir of Evermoor had yet to even begin the courting process. Why so many requests for meetings had gone politely rejected.

The truth was much less salacious than popular theory– as is usually the case. Quite simply, you’ve just yet to meet an eligible bachelor that doesn’t make you physically recoil at the prospect of being wed to them. Between the Dukes whose eyes on your female staff were… less than respectful and Counts who couldn’t make it longer than thirty seconds without saying something to stroke their own egos, you’d rather shovel the stables by hand than meet with any prospects for the time being.

There had been a close call once, just a few months back, where you’d met with a neighboring King who was charming enough at first. That is, of course, until the bastard had tried to pressure you into necking with him after dinner one night. You sent him packing on the spot. And your parents, the Queen and King, were irate. Apparently, not offending the royal family was more important than your honor.

Which, tragically, prompted them to force your hand into embarking on what would be your ‘grand tour’ throughout the nearby kingdoms. Officially, it was a tour to introduce you as the Crown Royal to your (pre-established and potential alike) ally’s own Royal Families. To establish a line of communication and get to know each other sooner rather than later. But none were gullible enough to miss the writing on the wall. You were unmarried, and most of the kingdoms you’d be visiting had unmarried royal sons of their own to offer. After all, for a royal as high-ranking as yourself, it’s most appropriate for you to marry other ‘high-value’ royalty. Those who would be Counts in their own right someday, some even Kings. Any children born would rule over both domains, doubling your families’ power and influence in the realm. (And that was all anything was ever about. Cue eye roll.)

Perhaps you’d have fought harder if you thought there was the slimmest chance of getting your way, but… why kid yourself? This was an inevitable. Since you were young, you’d known your fate would be that of most born of noble blood. To be used as a bargaining chip, a pawn in someone else’s game– one neither of you had elected to play.

Sure, there had been a time many years ago where you’d find yourself in despair over this. Growing up, your favorite stories were the ones told of love triumphing over all. You’d go to your balcony in the dead of night, wishing to any power that could hear you to be one of the lucky ones. For you to have the chance at a marriage of love. A husband you chose not because of the family crest he bore, but for the tender affection he showed you. The way he lit up your world, coloring your bluest nights into the tender pinks of the sunrise. Someone who was well and truly yours, divorced from the way nobility are traded like commodities, but how love brings two souls into one, merging until you can’t remember where you end and he begins. A love like poetry. A love worth writing about.

But those days were long behind you. Even the most hopeless of all romantics can’t resist the effects of erosion, the cynical waves of the ocean clawing at the coast until even something so eternal as the Earth itself gives way, becoming part of the ocean it once fought to resist so vehemently. Holding onto that optimism… at some point begins to hurt you more than it helps you. And so you, once as steady as the Earth in your quest for love, you surrendered to cynicism just as steadily, until you, too, found it hard to believe that love in the pure sense even existed at all. 

Of course, those were the times when your Equerry would ask you to accompany him on a trip to the local market. After all, none could read you quite like him. It came with the territory– his job, of course, to be your shadow. To care for you, and to watch over you. And he took his role very seriously. To him, this meant to help you through not just your meetings with the steward, but also to watch for signs that your spirits need lifting (despite this not technically being in his duties). And seeing how your mouth twitched into a frown any time someone mentioned the concept of love the past few months? He didn’t have to be a scholar to read you.

So he pulled you into the castle’s preferred bakery, calling for Mister and Missus Kim and producing a beaming smile when the pair came out from the back to say hello. The couple’s eyes shined every time they looked at one another, and the three of them talked about the castle’s weekly order as you watched from near the door, mindlessly eyeing the pastries on display in the cabinet, trying to ignore the way your chest fluttered just being around something so beautiful. She held a toddler on her hip, and the moment it crossed your mind that she was looking tired from holding the boy, her husband instinctively grabbed him, placing him to lay upon his own chest instead. It was as if they had their own language, something silent but incredibly tangible that tied them together. And it was a sight to behold.

Your heart felt much less heavy on the ride home, your eyebrows quirked in thoughtful wishing instead of the bitter resignation they tended towards. Your Equerry said nothing, his hands smoothing against the hat he’d placed on his lap as he smiled softly. He didn’t need your words to know he’d done well, even if he would love to hear them. But alas, the you of the present day was much too timid to speak what was on your mind. The thoughts were much too soft for someone who was to someday rule over this nation. But maybe, you thought, maybe you were what was too soft. Maybe fate had played a cruel joke in making you the only one who could govern your beloved country once your parents no longer could. Maybe it was all a fool’s errand.

Because you couldn’t help but feel that… perhaps you’ll never be lucky enough to possess a love of your own, but you’re more sure than you’ve ever been that love is one of the finest things humanity has to offer– so real, so tangible that it shone through the dark clouds hanging over your head. And you’d do anything it took to feel its embrace, even for the smallest moment in time.

It was hard to contend with the idea people had in their head about you at times. To them, you were the Crown Heir of Evermoor. Sole Heir at that. Flowers bloomed bright the day you were born, and (according to folklore) it’s impossible for a flower to wilt if it’s been blessed by your presence.

You care deeply for your nation, making certain your Equerry schedules an allotment every few weeks for you to visit the capital’s town square, relishing in the bustle of the city and the chatter of those hard at work, or those working to forget their hard day at work. But when they notice you, they’re quick to forget what they were doing. Instead, they either gawk openly, or rush to have their moment with you. Something they’ll remember for a lifetime; ‘the time the Crown Royal complimented my pelerine’ or ‘the time I made the Crown Royal smile by presenting them with a rose’. 

But at home? You’re just… you.

You’re sprawled out over your plush bed, dressed down to your chemise and pantaloons as your Handmaiden helped you sneak a second dessert to share, shutting the door to your quarters quietly as she, too, leapt to join you in your bed with a mischievous smile (though there was an unspoken tension in the air that neither of you cared to address just yet). Your hair hit your shoulders in what were once carefully-manicured curls that had loosened throughout the day. If it were anyone else, you’d be shamed for the lewdness of this moment, but this was another perk to having your best friend as your Handmaiden. With her, this was perfectly appropriate. Even if it wasn’t technically in the spirit of the rules.

The upcoming months hung over you like a death sentence. Tonight would be one of your last as a single person, one of the last you’d not be betrothed– or worse, married. At the end of the week, you’d be leaving on your tour. Leaving the only home you’d ever known to stay at palace after palace belonging to strangers who intended to sell you on their sons. And if there’s one thing you knew; the only thing more formidable than your citizens competing for your attention is dozens of nobles doing the same. At least your people had some sense of dignity.

Today was one of the last nights you’d be free to kid yourself into believing that, by some miracle, you’d get the fairytale ending you’ve always dreamed of. Because once you left the borders of Evermoor, there would be no returning without the burden of a ring on your finger, its center stone heavy with insurmountable expectations and a destiny you’d never get to seek.

Your thoughts were interrupted by the loud clink of a fork on your Handmaid's plate– a clearly theatrical gesture. 

“So?” She sat her plate aside without looking away from you. When you gave her no indication that you knew what she was about to broach, she continued, her voice casual and innocent. “How long were you planning on moping about for? I just mean to ensure we stay on schedule.” 

Eyes still trained on the plate of Ratafia Cake in front of you, you couldn’t help the smile that tugged at one corner of your mouth. You gave her a thoughtful hum. “I was thinking… maybe a couple more decades? Don’t want to overdo it, of course.” You looked to her with a facetious grin.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t buying it. “That sounds about right. I wouldn’t want to waste any more precious time I can’t get back either.” She kept the dry tone, but there was evident concern on her features. Perhaps a bit of frustration as well. 

Your smile faltered, the truth in her words hitting a little too close to the truth for comfort. You resorted to pushing your cake around on the small saucer, the prospect of eating suddenly much less alluring as the truth settled in your stomach like a stone. Your voice came out barely over a whisper; “What else can I do? It's not as if I have any say in the matter. I've pushed this off as long as I can. My parents…” You take an exasperated breath, “They aren’t going to budge this time.”

The pretense was dropped then, and she shifted to get comfortable, tone more serious. “I know. It's not fair the way this is happening. I hope you know I am really sorry about that.” 

“I just… don't think that the way you're thinking about this is really helpful to you.” She looked off, thought for a moment, then turned back to pick the situation apart. “We can't change the situation. So the way I see it, you have a few options here.”

You placed the cake to the side then, shifting to lean against the bedpost. Part of you felt the urge to dig in your heels, to protest, but unfortunately one of your best friend’s qualities happens to be that she’s almost always right about these things. So instead, you bite your tongue, nodding for her to continue.

“Option One; you go on the tour. You grin and bear it with the suitors. And really, you’ll only be with each of them for a short time. So if they’re that terrible, you’ll be out soon enough. Don’t worry about months or years from now– just focus on getting through this part. One step at a time.” She picked up her cake again, taking a shamelessly large bite and swallowing it quickly.

“I hate that you’re being made to choose this. But think of it this way: you do get a choice if you go. You can at least focus on trying to influence things to make your life easiest. And maybe you will end up liking someone, at least enough to try. I mean, the odds are one of them won’t be completely insufferable. And if they all are, I promise to let you mope until the end of time, okay?”

That has you laughing again, turning to look at her fully. “Careful; I may actually take you up on that. I really think I’ve yet to fully realize my true potential in the field of being annoying. And as my Handmaiden, you have special privileges as my guinea pig for just that.” You give her an easy smile, leaning on one side while you pick up your cake once more.

But as you take another bite, you ponder her words carefully. As suspected, she was right once again. Most noblewomen are not as lucky as you’ve been. You made it this far without being betrothed, and even then your parents are still allowing you the choice of who to marry instead of forcing someone upon you. So while the situation is certainly unideal… she’s right to say that you still have some freedom of choice. And while small, it’s best to count your blessings whenever they come, lest it drive you mad.

“You’re right.” You pause, trying to find a way to say what you mean without sounding naive. Or worse, corny. “What I want may be out of question, but I suppose any choice is better than none.” You furrow your brow for a moment, lost in thought. “Perhaps… some of these suitors also mourn this choice. Love may be off the table, but… perhaps we can be friends–” You pause once more, laughing softly. “–who just so happen to be married.”

You’re not sure why it took you so long to reach this conclusion. After all, noble as they may be, these suitors are human just as you are. Each of them have their own thoughts, goals, desires, dreams. And perhaps, like yours, theirs is also stifled by this imposed choice. Perhaps.

“Exactly,” she replied, face brightening a bit at your change in tone. “And… well, who knows?” She shrugged, not going any further into the thought. “At any rate, it won’t necessarily hurt to have a partner in crime.” 

“My, my– are you suggesting that I replace you now?” You tease her.

“Right. So what's Option Two, then?”

“Option Two; we let the kingdom burn, run away in the night and live on the lam. That one has a few kinks to work out.” She played it as straight as she could, but it was obvious from her face that she was trying to be funny. 

Your laughter comes out in a snort, her words catching you by surprise. “You know what? I'm half tempted to take you up on that. But I don't think Mr. Stick-in-the-mud Equerry would go for it. Tragic.”

“Oh, forget him,” she said lightly. “We can do it on our own.” She finished the last bite of her dessert.

You try to ignore the way you immediately feel guilty imagining the expression on your Equerry's face if he knew the details of this conversation. Even tonight, you had to practically beg him to take the night off so you could have this time with your Handmaiden. He's been practically glued to your side since the news of your fate reached him, ever protective of you. He means well, but… a girl needs to breathe sometimes. You can only imagine what he'd do, how he'd feel if you fled. You scrunch up your face apologetically at your Handmaiden, still smiling. “Sorry. Maybe next time.”

She laughs, shaking her head at you softly. “Seriously, though. Just try, okay? There must be some part of this that could work out for good.”

As you, too, finish the last bit of your cake, you nod solemnly in return. “Alright. I'll… try. But only because you asked me to.” You answer with an air of drama. “We should both hope this goes well. After all, he’ll soon be your problem just as much as he’ll be mine. It's your neck on the block too,” You joke.

“Don't I know it,” she replied, and collected the dish back from you. “And God help us both.”

“We just don’t want you to be so… dismissive. Alright, dear? Give them a chance. They just might surprise you. You’ve been so picky, and we won’t tolerate a repeat of last time.”

The words of your Father hit your ears like an arrow, and you’re rearing back to spit a harsh retort when you feel your Equerry place a steadying hand on your shoulder, just out of view of your parents across from you both. Looking at him, he gives you a sympathetic smile that does little to alleviate your anger, but it succeeds in holding you back if only because you hate fighting with your parents in front of him. (It stresses him out having to play the middle-man when he wants to have your back with no question.)

So you take a deep breath, letting your Father’s words linger in the air of the carriage, which suddenly felt hopelessly stuffy.

It wasn’t fifteen minutes later that the carriage slowed to a stop, signaling the end of your journey to meet the first of your suitors. Your heartbeat quickened, and as your attendant opened the door to the carriage, the sun pricked at your eyes.

While you waited as your eyes adjusted to the darkness, you noticed an unfamiliar hand reaching into your carriage, offering for you to grab to assist you out. “May I help you, Your Highness?”

And though it felt like diving into frigid waters in the black of night, you took the stranger’s hand.

[celestie0]

hi friends, i won’t be posting or updating any of my works for an indefinite period n will be on hiatus from this blog as well.

i’ve unlisted kickoff & ihm on ao3 (haven’t deleted, they’ve just been made private) and i’ve unpinned my masterlist here on tumblr (again nothing’s been deleted so you could probably find the chapters if you searched my tags)

but the reason i did that is because i don’t want any new readers finding my works during my hiatus because i don’t want to potentially upset more people in the event that, during this hiatus, i decide that i would no longer like to write my fics

that would be an insanely sad decision to make. i put so much thought into my stories not because i am trying to make them entertaining, but it’s because they genuinely mean so much to me and are cathartic in ways i can’t describe. i have spent a great majority of my life self negating for the sake of others, and so writing was just a form of expression where i could talk about all the things i’ve suppressed over the years - anxiety, career stress, financial stress, avoidance, depression, loss, coming of age, navigating love, etc

but lately, and i do think it’s been a build up of just some careless words from a handful of people over the months, i find myself steering towards a practice of writing that is no longer asking the question “how can i put as much of myself in this piece as possible?” but rather “how can i make sure people won’t criticize this…i feel awful that it doesn’t have what they want it to have…other creators are doing xyz, should i be doing that too?…i’m just scared to share this”

not exactly sure when that shift in headspace began, but as of right now, it’s as strong as ever. and i understand that those questions may seem irrational, and i just have to try to not focus on the feeling, n i wish i was someone that could compartmentalize those thoughts better, but here’s the thing — the whole reason i started expressing myself through writing in the first place was because i’ve spent my whole life compartmentalizing. it would feel so ironic & untrue to the lessons i’ve learned in this journey if i just chose to “suck this up” and continue pushing forward until i reach a point of burnout simply because i don’t want to upset anyone

i’m really sorry i couldn’t focus on the positive. especially with all the insane n incredible amount of love n support i’ve received for my works. i’ve said this time n time again but when i started posting kickoff to ao3 back in january of this year, i had NO idea it would be this loved by so many people…i was like ok can’t wait to interact w these four readers for the rest of the year…and then BAM, i find myself fully sobbing after each chapter update because i was so touched by all the sweet n kind words. i don’t want this decision to come off in a way that makes it seems like i don’t love u guys sm or that i’m ungrateful — i’ve always taken pride in respecting my audience. even for a simple hobby, i try to put effort into my works. i proofread, i plan out, i edit in length, all because i am, well, for one, i’m a bit of a perfectionist LOL but also i think there’s a great deal of honor in respecting an audience that gives you their time n attention

but i already am struggling in my life to focus on the positive. medicine has been such an incredibly daunting career to pursue, i’m honestly only doing slightly better now because i’m just filled with relief that i got into med school to begin with lol it’s still surreal to me, so the stress has been kinda manageable so far on that sense of optimism, but dear god the shit i went through to get here…and the shit i know i still face ahead of me. i spend all of my serotonin on trying to stay positive in the face of my responsibilities. so all of this time i’ve spent trying to stay positive for the sake of my stories too has just left me with so much exhaustion — i just don’t see why posting my works should be anything less than fun and endlessly exciting when it’s a hobby that’s supposed to help me thru the actual brunt of life.

anyways, i’m getting a little carried away here. all this to say, i just need to take time away from posting my works so i can see writing as something for myself n not for others again. i don’t want the thoughts swimming in my head to be thoughts of anxiety over people potentially criticizing me n my creative decisions. i want the thoughts in my head to once again be positive, excited, and nurturing towards my stories. i don’t see how i can accomplish that at this point unless i start writing for myself once more, and not for others

i still have a great deal of passion to write, which is why i haven’t formally taken down my works. i anticipate that i may be able to come back in the future to share my writing again. but as of right now, i just want to heal the relationship that i have with this hobby, and i feel like that’s gotta happen in private (lmfao it sounds like im tryna freak my writing)

i’m sorry that i turned off my asks n my replies, i know so many of u care about me n want to support me n i just am beyond thankful. i don’t anticipate this is a forever goodbye, but i do just need some time rn away from all of this.

hope u all have a happy time!! and take care of yourselves :) much love

- ellie

[astro-cattus]

A Change of Perspective

I was not expecting so much attention on my latest Flatland artwork, as I´m writting my biggest post so far it´s about to hit 400 notes.

Thank you to everyone for sharing my artwork, following me and thanks to everybody leaving comments on them, I truly appreciate what you have to say about my work!

So, I wanted to write a little about my personal relationship with this novel. Although small, it did help me create a point of reference for my growth over these years.

I knew about this novel since 2016, after the 2016 Bill Q&A mentions Edwin A. Abott. Of course my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to figure out this world. I ended up falling on a 4th dimension theory and Mathematics rabbit hole.

Since a lot of conversations surrounding the book where around theories on the 4th dimension, rather than giving political comentary on the book. As it´s rediscovery was made in the year 1920´s, one could imagine why that was the case. For the most part, due to Einstein´s main interest being how Edwin A. was able to somehow predict the 4th dimension´s existence.

Thanks to this, I didn´t take Flatland´s themes into consideration, and just read a few chapters out of order.

July 2024, The Book of Bill releases. Once again, there´s a reference to the novel in one of the pages. And for old times sake I decided to revisit Flatland. Curiously it´s when I got recommended the 2007 Flatland movie to no end, I eventually, after a long weekend of College work, decided to watch it as I animated.

After that, I decided this time I would finally give myself the time to finish the novel. With an older and more open mind I was able to finish the book and understand it´s themes; critiquing bigotry and seeing the world through a whole new perspective. Makes me wish little me finished the book instead of taking its message for granted, could’ve helped get over some mayor denial I had back then.

I believe things happen a certain way for a reason, maybe it was for the better that I didn’t finish that book back then, at least it gave me the opportunity to better appreciate it :^]c

I hope this community keeps on growing. And I hope to see more people create more content for this interesting world!

[nonbinarypirat]

Okay okay, SO let’s talk about the latest chapter of Iruma kun because the lore is JUICY. Spoilers for chapter 358. This also leaves me with even more questions while answering some I had before. So I actually had a post planned where I was going to ask why Delkira received a special and sublime classroom to begin with. I wondered if maybe he was a previous demon king’s son and maybe that was why he was already revered. But NOPE it seems not likely. It’s still possible, I just got the vibe was that he was miraculous in his achievements and power. So it kind of answers that question but we still have no info on his family, the king’s classroom, or how he was able to achieve so much. On the other hand we got some VERY VERY interesting lore on Mephisto-pheles. It also explains why he gave this task to Iruma since he obviously sees the potential for him to surpass Delkira in the future. He wants Iruma to know what it takes to be in power, somewhat as an advisor role like he has been for previous kings. By assisting a king you can understand how to rule. And by building up a country, you can know what it takes to lead a country. I already guessed that since he was already interested in Iruma. But this just adds an extra layer to why he is as fascinated by him as he is. GOD NISHI IS SO GOOD AT WRITING LORE. I ASPIRE to write something with as much depth and intricacies as this manga. She is my inspiration truly 🙏🏽

Like, look at Mephisto’s face here compared to after he met Iruma. Different face but same vibe.

Now, going back to Delkira one, we get to see more of his personality and he’s so much like Iruma!!!!! No wonder everyone and their fucking mom keeps being like, “damn why tf do I see Delkira in him.” Neither strive for power for power’s sake, instead they strive for power because they see it as a step forward in their goal and desires. They both want to find their own path rather than it just being given to them. It really shocked me at first that Delkira turned Mephisto down but it actually makes so much sense why everyone is enamored by him. That is the most undemon like thing he could have done, he had the perfect opportunity to gain all the power in the world in a quick and easy way. Any other demon would have killed for that chance. They are so fucking alike and it makes me want to rage. I love it so much, I love that we are getting to see more of him as time goes on. Him and Iruma even have the same smile! Like come on.

He even has similar jesters to Iruma!!!! This flashback is making me rethink my theories about him and his connection to Iruma. Ughhhh, I’m so fucking happy about this. Also, this nothing to do with anything but look at Delkira’s cunty lil outfit. This sheer shirt? Rolled up uniform jacket he has popped open. These tight pants with a weird belt design? I would be Delkira’s number one supporter is all I’m saying. He’s babygirl just like Iruma. Maybe that’s the requirement to be the next powerful demon king, you have to serve mother fucking CUNT if you want to rule. Anyway, I think there was more I wanted to say but I got distracted with my rant lol. I just love this lore so much, I love how Nishi handles lore drops (especially with characters) and seeing more of Delkira because I am so fascinated with him and must know more.

[heeseungiez]

RESOLUTION 1) actually enjoy a party...

pairings! lee heeseung x fem!reader, choi yeonjun x fem!reader briefly

synopsis! lee heeseung has known you your whole life. he has always kept you at an arm’s length due to his childhood pettiness after being forced to spend time with you as kids. but now that you were back in town, going to school again, he finds his resolve to dislike you at all costs crumbling between his fingers. as if it hadn’t always been chipping away throughout the years.

content warnings! smut (mdni! 18+), swearing, mentions of bullying, joking about past trauma to cope, angst, jealousy, kissing, fingering etc.

word count! ~5.4k

taglist! OPEN! @strxwbloody @starsenha

a/n! first two chapters are written so i think it's fair to post this... feel free to let me know what you think! i actually don't usually write smut so um... yeah

masterlist | next

Good morning, Decelis! Guess who’s back?

And no, I’m not talking about myself at the moment, but rather, a princess of a successful empire, and our beloved black sheep of the school. It’s quite ironic, isn’t it? In a place where money is power, she has none despite the billions she’s meant to inherit. Poor girl, wouldn’t you say?

But rumours have it that our princess is back from her prolonged summer break abroad, and she’s different than we remember.

It seems that the good girl image has been thrown to the wolves, and the princess is back with a bite of her own.

I’m most definitely looking forward to what this year brings us.

XO, Miss Decelis

You put down your phone with a grin, having read the Twitter post from your school’s infamous gossip blog. Very clearly inspired by Gossip Girl, it was the talk of Decelis Academy when the first post appeared out of nowhere, featuring a very, very popular boy from the upper year, calling out his blatant cheating on his incredibly attractive, and notoriously vengeful girlfriend.

This was the first time Miss Decelis had something nice to say about you, and you were currently hoping to milk the pity points for what happened last year. You were tired from the constant jabs at your lack of social skills and neverending embarrassment, making it known to all of your peers that you couldn’t do anything right.

Everything was different now. At least for you, things have changed since your trip to the USA, if you could even call it that. Since most of what you saw was the best rated rehabilitation centre in the world, trying to get your legs to work properly again after the incident that happened last year. (Good news: they succeeded.)

Who would’ve thought that pushing you into a pool at a party could cause such damage to your body? Your muscles tore with the abruptness of everything, your ankle catching on the edge of the pool and you found yourself paralysed from the waist down at the bottom of the pool afterwards, nearly drowning because people, for some reason, thought you were being dramatic for the sake of it. 

Your best friend, Lee Jeonghyeon, pulled you out once he found out what happened. And when you told him you couldn’t feel your legs, one of which was horribly bent and bruising, he screamed his lungs out to get someone to call you an ambulance. It was safe to say the party ended quickly afterwards.

You had to get surgery in the country, and then your parents decided it would be best for you to have your rehabilitation elsewhere. Far away from Decelis Academy. Since it happened a month before the term would’ve ended, you still had to do homework and assignments to finish your sophomore year, but at least it wasn’t around the people that ostracised you for whatever reason.

Originally, you were supposed to change schools. But the Decelis principal expelled the group that caused your injury because it was found out that (although you tried to keep it a secret for as long as possible) they had been bullying you for years. So yeah, you were back home and still attending Decelis Academy. 

You completely blocked out anything that was said between your father and the principal as they spoke in the office with you sitting on a chair behind them. It was business that you weren’t interested in, and they were mostly trying to figure out how to protect you from stuff like last year happening again. Yawning, you stretched your arms, wishing you could be in class instead.

“She will be monitored, in case something else were to happen, although I trust your daughter’s rehabilitation went without much as a single snatch.” The principal glanced at you while speaking to your father, his respect showing in his eyes, his straight posture and the voice in which he addressed the man standing before him.

Your father nodded. “I’m glad to hear that. If there are any issues, please let me know. And let everyone at the board as well as the parents know that anyone who will dare lay a finger on my daughter again will be sued for their entire fortune. The acts of her bullies were not harmless, and even if what happened was an accident, it was done with malicious intent.”

Well, that was exactly why you tried to keep the bullying a secret. But what’s done is done. You just wanted to get out of the principal’s office. 

“Good. There are more things we must discuss, but—”

You knew what that phrasing meant, already standing up with a smile. “I’ll go find my next class,” you said, cutting off your father. “Thanks for all the care and stuff, I’ll try to keep myself out of trouble and from, you know, looking weak and bully-able, whatever.”

Pretending not to care has become so easy for you lately that you internally cringed, seeing the pitying looks on the faces of both your father and the principal. You mostly ignored it. 

“Goodbye, Mr Jung. See you later, dad.”

But you didn’t leave the principal’s office until after receiving a kiss on your temple from your father, a sweet gesture to remind you that you were loved — at least by your parents. 

Lee Heeseung had known you his whole life. The two of you had known each other even before you were conceived, he’d say, and that annoyed him about you. That you were in every part of his life. Every memory, good and bad, every single one of his thoughts. Gods, you even lived in the same building as he did. So, you were always there, like a ghost haunting him for a mistake in his past life. So he avoided you whenever he could, unless it was necessary for him to be in your presence. Which was usually during any family functions because if the Lee family organised an event, then yours was the first on the list of invited guests. And if your family did, then his family was expected to show up no matter what.

Before Heeseung met Jay and Jake, it had always only been the two of you. So when you were children, he made sure to especially tease you, like pulling at your hair or eating the last cookie. It was his way of making sure you would stay away from him whenever he was with his other friends (none were people he really cared about, and although he still spoke to some of them, those friendships were distant memories). But he thought you were too much of a girl for him. While you played with dolls, he wanted to play with cars, and he was not going to let you rope him into role playing Barbie and Ken with you just because your face was cute with how round and rosy it was.

Then the two of you entered middle school at Decelis Academy, and Heeseung met Park Jay and Sim Jake. Both boys were from prominent families, and the friendship between the three helped all their companies bloom even more. But, of course, yours was always included as well.

It was only his luck that his cousin, Lee Jeonghyeon, moved in with him and his parents to attend Decelis Academy too. Which meant that you found a new friend, someone who actually wanted to hang out with you, while Heeseung was free to do whatever he wanted with his friends. And still, you never stopped trying to keep the conditions between you all amiable, even when they, especially Heeseung and Jay, were rude and dismissive of you.

Today, you strutted into Sociology class without as much as an apology to the teacher (a complete 180° from what you would’ve done last year) and went to sit down in the first available spot at the back of the class, which happened to be next to Heeseung. He rolled his eyes, debating whether he should push you off the chair because he’d fought really hard to keep the spot free. But when his eyes fell on your figure, he had a hard time peeling them off.

Miss Decelis was right. There was something different about you.

Normally, you would’ve sat at the front of the class. Not just because you were a teacher’s pet, but also because you used to wear glasses and it was better for your vision to be at the front. Your glasses were gone, though.

You didn’t as much as glance at Heeseung as you sat down, not even gracing him with your acknowledgement despite sitting next to him. You used to do everything in your power to get his attention (which he thought was cute but that made him dislike you more) because you thought you two should get along as your families worked so closely together, not to mention you lived in a penthouse at his family’s hotel, the same one he lived in.

He shuffled in his seat to sit straighter, leaning on the desk in an attempt to get you to look at him. But you didn’t. So he stared at you intently, noticing every detail about this new you that was back from America.

Your hair was cut shorter, messier, and framed your face perfectly as opposed to the girlish bangs you used to have. Even your makeup was bolder, wings lining your eyes, accentuating their shape. No longer were you following the country’s beauty trends, and it suited you more.

So he continued staring at you even when you opened your textbook and started taking notes with the teacher speaking in the background. He didn’t care for the class much, especially because he could buy notes off of someone from the upper year and then spend a fortnight cramming before an exam and still pass with top-performing grades.

You ignored Heeseung for as long as you could until it became unbearably uncomfortable to have his eyes permanently stuck to you. The way you interpreted the look, it made you feel like you were a fly he was watching to later swat once the perfect moment appeared. An indignant huff left your lips as you spoke: “Do you want to lose your eyes?” Your brow rose, but you did not look at him. Even as you gripped your pen tighter, truly considering putting it to a use much different than what it’s intended for.

The corner of Heeseung’s mouth rose in a silent victory because you finally decided to acknowledge him. “You could try, but I doubt you’d get away with it,” he replied. 

“I would,” you mumbled. “I’d get out of it unscathed because of my current frail mental state and my pity points with the principal.” Despite the lie, you spoke matter-of-factly. “So don’t test me.”

“So you’re saying you’ve gone crazy?”

“Perhaps.”

“Is it enough to go to a party this weekend?” Heeseung asked sweetly, leaning closer to you, but it was him who ended up disconcerted when you turned your head. Your noses touched, and you pushed him away by poking his chest. 

“You’re really asking me to go to a party after what happened last time?”

“Nobody’s gonna try to hurt you if you’re with me,” Heeseung said with certainty, but you squinted your eyes at the statement. For two reasons in total. One, he was among the most popular guys at Decelis Academy, so going with him meant antagonising at least half of the school; and two, why was he asking you to go to the party with him?

“Of all the people at this school, your pity is the one I need the least,” you scoffed, shaking your head. “We’ve never been friends before, Heeseung, so let’s not pretend we are friends now.”

Heeseung furrowed his brows at you. “This isn’t about pity—”

“What else would it be about? You don’t like me, and I’m tired, okay? I get it, and I’m not gonna bother your stupid I’m-better-than-thou self anymore. You were right, Heeseung. Just because our families are close, we don’t need to be.” You shut him up, turning away from him to bring your attention back to the lecture.

Heeseung gaped at you, blinking a few times to comprehend your rejection properly. But this was never about pity. It was about your attention, and how much he wanted to have it now that you were back.

But he couldn’t exactly tell you that he missed your stupid little face whenever there was a family function during the summer, could he? You were the girl he knew since the day you were born, and the last thing he wanted to face was the simple fact that he didn’t, in fact, dislike you. 

Despite rejecting Heeseung’s offer to go with him, you did turn up to the party. It was easy to find out that Yang Jeongin was throwing one alongside Seo Changbin, since it seemed that Changbin’s family was away on a business trip. So you dressed up and went to the Seo family mansion with Jeonghyeon, your best friend and neighbour, and Park Hanbin at your side. 

The dress you wore today was thin and far more revealing than what you would’ve worn last year, but this was all a part of your plan for this following year. You had a bunch of resolutions for your junior year and onward that you wanted to fulfil as fast as possible, all of which would help you live a life worthy of being spoken about on Miss Decelis, rather than being constantly humiliated by your lack of… living.

Today, Miss Decelis reported on seeing Park Jay and his new fling — an older woman possibly twice his age — leaving a motel together. That was the kind of life you wanted to lead, instead of the perfect princess with a spotless past who didn’t even fight back against her bullies.

So the first resolution you had was to attend a party and actually enjoy being there. In the past, you always attended because your friends would. Since you didn’t drink, you were the person who looked after everyone.

“Look, Ning and Winter are there,” Hanbin pointed toward the two girls, and you grinned, making your way toward them.

“Hi!” you greeted them.

“Hey, girl! You look scrumptious,” Ning remarked, eyeing your outfit with a smirk. “I’m really liking this new you. Are you trying to get on Miss Decelis tonight or what?”

You shrugged, a hint of a smile on your lips. “It certainly wouldn’t hurt. As long as it’s not something commemorating what happened to me at my last party, or… anything before, really.”

“It’s been shit these past few years,” said Winter, earning hums of agreement. “I’d rather never appear on Miss Decelis unless she has something good to say. I mean, we’re not even men, so we can’t just walk around like everything is fine after hooking up with someone the age of our mother…” Winter rolled her eyes, referencing the last post about Jay.

“Lucky you, then. Miss Decelis has never said anything bad about you. At least not something that wasn’t true,” you said matter-of-factly, well versed in the posts of the gossip monger. Although, in your opinion, Winter led an exciting life, it was never out of line enough to be reported on.

Winter giggled. “True.”

“And Jeonghyeon is a beloved hero now,” you added with a nod toward your best friend. It was a bit of a stretch, but he was viewed as someone swoon-worthy after pulling you out of the pool and saving your life. Miss Decelis surely made it sound like it before last school year ended.

He frowned, not liking the reminder of what had happened. It affected him more than you, clearly, the idea of losing you over someone thinking that pushing you into a pool would be a harmless enough prank. You shouldn’t be joking about it, yet it was your coping mechanism. The more jokes you made, the less real it became, and the less it hurt. 

“I’m never leaving your side,” he grumbled, interlocking your arm with his.

“Please do,” you said, trying to shake him off, but he didn’t let go. “Hyeon, I’ll be fine. I’m serious.” You glared at him, yanking your arm from his grip the more he tried to keep you in place.

“Dude, let her go.” It was Hanbin who spoke, sensing your discomfort. “We’re all worried for her, but this isn’t doing her any favours.”

Ning and Winter nodded as well. “We’ll keep an eye on her, don’t worry,” they said, but it was hard to keep a promise when all of you planned to drink the night away.

Two hours in, you were already spent and dizzy. But you were giggling, and couldn’t say that you weren’t enjoying yourself. Especially the attention you got from people who couldn’t stop staring at you and the piece of fabric that mostly covered only your important parts.

A year ago, you were weighed down by the chains of responsibility, drowning you the same way the water had at the bottom of the pool. You couldn’t even allow yourself to enjoy the smallest things back then in fear of being judged. This time, if someone bullies you, you will be sure to hit back. And you’re going to hit back hard.

The sofa dipped with a new weight upon it, and you turned to face a familiar face. Someone you had come across in America a few times and had pleasant interactions with (if you could call it that).

Choi Yeonjun looked magnificent even with his cheeks flushed red, his hair dishevelled and eyes dazed. His pouty lips were captured in between his teeth, and you grinned at him when he cuddled up to you. “Hello,” he mumbled against the bare skin of your shoulder.

“Hey.” You shifted in your seat, simply to make both of you rest comfortably on the sofa. “Haven’t seen your face in a while,” you said, and he hummed, looking into your eyes.

“You took my advice,” he remarked, and you knew what he meant by it. 

The change of your hairstyle, your general clothing preferences and view of life wasn’t just something you came up with on your own. Because when you had seen Yeonjun the last time, before he had to leave, he told you that you should live your life a little. Stop pretending to be perfect, and start being your authentic self — the version of you he had met in the States. The version of you that you wanted to be rather than a version that society wanted you to be. 

“Very wise advice,” you agreed with a grin.

“I always know what’s up,” he grinned back at you, his arms snaking around your waist, seeking the warmth of your body in the most innocent way possible, though it could be easily misinterpreted. But you and Yeonjun were friends (question mark?). 

Friends who may have kissed, but friends regardless. 

“Where’s your friends?” you asked Yeonjun, running your hand through his hair to tame it. It was surprisingly soft, but that was perhaps a perk of expensive hair care. 

“Playing beer-pong,” he answered, purring like a cat as you continued playing with his hair. “Taehyun is playing against Soobin, Beomgyu and Kai, trying to get the three of them drunk, since they actually suck ass at beer pong.” You yelped when Yeonjun moved suddenly to lift your legs and put them over his lap. “I was supposed to be on Taehyun’s team but it was more fair without me.”

“That bad?” You could barely breathe with how close Yeonjun was to you. In your mind, you two were friends, but you didn’t actually know how he viewed you. You were never adept at interacting with guys beyond the realm of platonic relationships.

Yeonjun hummed. “I don’t like feeling left out but… I guess I wouldn’t have known you’re here otherwise.”

“Well, there is a lot of people. And this is a huge house,” you said breathlessly when Yeonjun’s hands slipped underneath your dress through the back, caressing your skin with tenderness you had only read about before.

Had you mentioned your second resolution of the year earlier? The fact that you wanted to lose your virginity?

Choi Yeonjun seemed like the perfect candidate for making it happen. But you also couldn’t deny the fact that you were drunk, and he was probably even worse off.

Still, you couldn’t resist the urge to slip your hands beneath his loose T-shirt, exploring his toned stomach. You were sure he had once boasted to you about having his own gym at home. 

Yeonjun looked up at you with his eyes open wide, and his pupils dilated. 

It was you who asked, “Can I kiss you?” But it was him who closed the distance between the two of you, Yeonjun’s mouth expertly dancing alongside yours. 

This kiss was different to the ones you shared in America. Those were small, fleeting kisses stolen in moments of peace, where the both of you wanted to sear the memories into your brains. But this kiss was hungry, full of heat you’ve never let yourself feel before. Yeonjun grabbed at every part of you in an attempt to bring you closer, while you let him, well aware that everyone could see you, but you didn’t care. Not anymore, anyway.

It was his advice you were following, after all.

“Yeonjun,” you spoke, trying to catch your breath. 

“Yeah?” The boy was merciful enough to let you breathe, choosing to attack your neck instead, leaving sloppy kisses along the sensitive skin. You moaned when he bit an especially tender spot, and he smirked against your skin. 

“I need—” 

Yeonjun silenced you with his lips on yours, not letting you finish the sentence. Instead, his hand moved up your thigh, massaging a spot not close enough to where you really wanted his hand to be. “Not here, darling,” he whispered in your ear before helping you stand up.

Taking your hand, Yeonjun knew exactly where the two of you would need to go to get some well-earned privacy. If it wasn’t for the storm of a person right in front of you with his arms folded across his chest, nearly fuming. 

“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” The question wasn’t aimed at you. As if you didn’t have a mind of your own and you weren’t capable of making your own decisions.

Yeonjun glanced between you and the tall boy who stepped in your way. “That’s the guy who’s been ignoring you your whole life, right?” he said, knowing that the comment hurt Heeseung more than it did you. Because while you came to terms with it, Heeseung was just starting to feel guilty about it. He bristled, not liking that Yeonjun even knew this much about you.

“Get out of the way, Heeseung,” you said evenly, though anger easily washed over you. How dare he, the well-known fuck boy of Decelis Academy, cockblock you?

“No.” Heeseung shook his head, grabbing your hand.

You didn’t even realise it when he pulled you to himself and started dragging you away from Yeonjun. By the time you tried to fight him on it, you were losing Yeonjun in the crowd, and Heeseung’s grip on you was strong enough to bruise, so attempting to get out of his grasp would do more harm than good.

“Are you crazy? What the fuck are you doing? Heeseung!” you shouted over the music as he dragged you through the mansion like a doll until the both of you were out of the house, at the empty front yard. “Heeseung!”

He didn’t respond to you until he opened the door to a car that was not his, but he had access to it. He practically pushed you inside the vehicle without as much as a word, trapping you inside with him.

“What’s your fucking problem?” you spat venomously, facing him in the back of the car. It was dark and you could barely see anything besides the outline of Heeseung’s figure. A very tall and attractive figure with broad shoulders that, because of your moment with Yeonjun, made you think things you should not be having about Lee Heeseung.

“Are you insane? Hooking up with Choi Yeonjun?” He finally spoke up. His voice was deeper, a near growl, and you scoffed at his hypocrisy.

“So what? I like him,” you said, crossing your arms. “I’m not the same person I used to be and I’m not going back. So whatever your deal is, leave me the fuck out.”

Heeseung’s jaw clenched as he stared at you, completely oblivious to the unreasonable amounts of jealousy rushing through his system. He, of all people, should care about who you hook up with the least, and yet here he was, having trapped you inside Sunghoon’s car to keep you away from Yeonjun, who clearly wanted to take everything you had to offer. He had watched you from a distance, longer than he should’ve, and he hated the way he wished to be in Yeonjun’s place.

“I was the one who told you about this party.” He glared at you, and your stupidly attractive face, incapable of deciding whether doing this was a good idea or not. Because he didn’t just trap you with him. He trapped himself with you.

“So what? I just wanted to enjoy myself for once, for fuck’s sake. Is that such a crime?” You reciprocated Heeseung’s glare, your cheeks flushed and body hot despite the chilly temperature inside the car. You wanted to jump him. Whether to kill him or to finally have your brains fucked out of you, you weren’t sure.

“Yes, yes it is,” Heeseung replied, licking his lips. “Because it’s not with me.”

The latter.

It was most certainly the latter.

The hate coursing through you charged your oncoming actions, and you cupped Heeseung’s cheeks in your hands, bringing his plush lips to yours, making him the second guy you’ve kissed, ever, and the second guy today. It occurred to you that you really did not even care who you lost your virginity to.

Heeseung was as good as anyone else.

A part of you didn’t expect him to kiss you back, but you were pleasantly surprised when he did, his hands moving to your waist. Bringing you closer to him, he let his hands wander further than Yeonjun’s did, swallowing the gasp that left your lips as he swiped his fingers across your clothed and very wet cunt. It drove him crazy, not knowing whether it was him who had that effect on you, or if it had been Yeonjun, but he’d do better not to dwell on it. 

Heeseung was going to be the one ultimately helping you enjoy yourself. He would make sure of it, claiming the moment for himself. Claiming you for himself because he couldn’t bear the thought of you vying for anyone’s attention but his.

It had always been you and him. You were his as much as he was yours, no matter how much he had fought the fact in the past. 

Pushing the clothing piece aside, he let his thumb slide across your clit, driving a moan out of you. Heat enveloped you with the sudden rush of pleasure, your back arching to give him better access. Your hands raked through Heeseung’s hair as his mouth travelled to your throat, kissing all the same spots Yeonjun had earlier, except unlike Yeonjun, Heeseung sucked on the spots with enough fervour to mark, knowing you would have to spend weeks covering those up.

Heeseung’s thumb circled your clit, enjoying every single sound that left your mouth, including the hazed “Heeseung, yes,” and “Heeseung, please.” Until he pushed his fingers between your folds, trying to find the spot that would drive you over the edge. He had no idea how addictive it would be to hear you whispering his name like a prayer to a God, but here he was, listening to it all.

He curled his fingers when he found it, and you cried out his name, which died on your lips as he kissed you again, fingers still pumping in and out of you. 

“Heeseung, oh my god,” you murmured against his lips as he assuredly drove you to your climax. Heat pooled through your tummy in the most delicious way possible, and you moved your hips in rhythm with the thrusts of his fingers while he kept attacking your clit with the circular movements of his thumb.

“Yeah, princess, just let it out,” Heeseung said huskily, using the pet name that was usually reserved for his taunts rather than this. “You make the sweetest sounds,” he whispered in your ear, latching his lips onto your collarbone. A strap of your dress fell, partially revealing your breasts. Something that Heeseung took advantage of, his lips wandering lower.

“Oh, fuck, I’m so—” close, you wanted to say, but an entirely different sound — one that Heeseung wanted to bottle up and listen to forever — left your mouth when you felt Heeseung’s warm mouth around one of your nipples. 

“Fuck, Hee!” you screamed, your body trembling as you finally reached your climax, cumming all over Heeseung’s fingers. He continued his movements even as you rode out your high, and when he wanted to kiss you again, he took a moment to appreciate the relaxed look on your face. Something very rare from a person who used to forbid themselves from having fun.

See, Heeseung didn’t dislike you.

He just liked you more than he wanted to admit.

The sound of the car's unlocking beep pulled the two of you apart, much to both your discontent. But it wasn’t hard to school your expression back into one of hatred as you looked back at Heeseung while his friends filed inside the car. You crossed your arms and legs, turning away from him.

“We’re taking you home, apparently,” said Park Sunghoon with a smile on his face because he’d always been the one guy in the group who genuinely seemed to get along with you. He was the designated driver, but you guessed that had something to do with him being an athlete on a scholarship. 

Park Jay took the passenger seat next to Sunghoon, and when Sim Jake got inside, he made you sit in the middle between him and Heeseung. You were glad you could blame the flush on your cheeks on alcohol. 

“Hey, Y/N, I had no clue you were at the party!” Jake’s bright voice forced you to look at him. His blond hair was styled out of his face, and you couldn’t help but think that it suited him. You still wondered if he had dyed it over the summer because of a dare, or simply because he wanted to.

“Yeah, well, maybe that’s a good thing,” you mumbled, trying to make yourself smaller as you felt Heeseung’s heat against your skin. “Means nobody tried to drown me in the pool or anything.”

“Don’t fucking joke about that, Y/N.” Jay’s sharp voice cut through the air like a knife, making you straighten in your seat, your eyes wide in surprise.

“Why can’t I? You don’t even care.” You rolled your eyes, and Jay turned in his seat to look at you, his eyes scrutinising every part of you. Clearly, he didn’t expect to see what he did, and his gaze went back to the front of the car in an instant. 

“Whatever,” he said.

“Your strap is falling off,” Heeseung whispered in your ear.

“Who did that?” Jake added as well, pointing at the marks on your neck that were starting to colour. 

And you bashfully corrected your dress, looking away from Heeseung. “It was Yeonjun,” you lied easily, feeling Heeseung tense next to you.

“Ah, so that’s why we’re taking you home…” Sunghoon spoke knowingly, when in reality, he didn’t know anything. 

“Yeah. That’s why,” you echoed.

Good morning, Decelis! 

It seems a lot has happened this weekend. I heard that our little princess has truly begun evolving! Like a caterpillar finally turning into a butterfly.

Rumours have it, she got freaky on Seo Changbin’s sofa with none other than Choi Yeonjun. 

Or are those considered rumours if there’s video proof?

XO, Miss Decelis

[writingquestionsanswered]

How can I write the banter between a character and his/her friends? (how can I put a joke into writing in the most natural way?)

^I'm sorry for my english, this is not my first language^

Writing Natural Banter

There are two main reasons why banter comes off feeling unnatural in a story:

1 - The Dialogue is Unnecessary - Good stories have a relative balance of dialogue, action, and exposition. However, just as action and exposition needs to have a purpose in the story, so does dialogue. In other words, a moment of dialogue between your characters needs to be there to move the plot forward, develop the setting or world building, deliver backstory, develop character, or deliver vital information.

If you find yourself starting a conversation between characters just for the sake of banter or dropping a particular joke, and not because it accomplishes something important, the dialogue will fall flat because it doesn't need to be there. Instead, save banter for dialogue moments that need to be there... moments when your characters are talking because they need to talk

2 - The Banter is Irrelevant - In real life, banter tends to be topical. In other words, it's relevant to something happening in that moment. So, when your characters are having (or are about to have) a necessary moment of dialogue, think about the things that are relevant to them in that moment. What topical things might they comment on as they head into this conversation or mid-conversation? For example, if the previous chapter involved a big action scene where the characters were being chased by the bad guys, they might have a conversation the next day in which they make future plans. So, as they go into this conversation, what topical things might they comment on? Perhaps someone makes a joke about something that happened during the chase, just to lighten the mood? Or, maybe someone makes a joke about the place where they're having the conversation? Maybe someone suggests that their next move should be to research where the bad guys have their lair, and that might be an opportunity for someone to make a quip about who among them is good or bad at research. Again, it's all about relating the banter to what's already being talked about rather than pulling it out of thin air.

Making sure the banter and jokes are relevant to what's going on and what's being said helps to make it feel natural.

Happy writing!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

♦ Questions that violate my ask policies will be deleted! ♦ Please see my master list of top posts before asking ♦ Learn more about WQA here

[chuluoyi]

UNHOLY MATRIMONY — 06

✩°｡ ⋆ a longer dream

- fushiguro megumi x oc/reader - oc/reader's character name is hara sena, pronouns still refer to “you” and i won’t mention it often—just for the sake of aesthetic rather than repeatedly writing "y/n"

in another life, in which fate is still screwing his life over, Fushiguro Megumi finds himself in an arranged marriage―with you.

genre/warnings: arranged marriage au, mild angst, hurt/comfort, fluff, descriptions of aggressive behavior (hair pulling, hand stomping—but not to the reader)

notes: an early release! please believe me when i said that i really wanted to add megumi's reaction in the previous chapter. i cut it because it got too long already.

oh and with this i’m announcing that unholy matrimony will be on break next week to ensure the best experience :( chapter 7 will be posted on november 6, i promise.

listen to: i will stay with you - gummy :)

series masterlist | next. love unspoken

This can’t be right.

Megumi must have heard wrong.

It was barely seven in the morning, he had just woken up, and the first thing he heard was... you were asking for a what? Divorce?

"What, why?" he immediately snapped.

You kept your head low. "Because there's no reason for us to be together anymore. This whole thing―" you gestured to everything around you as you tried to contain your emotions, "―started just because I have no choice but to obey my father so that he wouldn’t take my mom as a hostage."

Honestly, Megumi didn't understand. Maybe his brain was lagging because it was meant to be a tranquil Sunday morning. But he couldn't make the heads or tails of whatever you were spouting now.

"Now that my mom is no longer in the picture," you continued, your voice steady and your eyes devoid of doubt. "He has no other means to control me. He can't have his way with me anymore."

"Hold on—" He was exasperated. Nothing's making sense. "This doesn't necessarily lead to divorce. Sena, what are you thinking?"

“I’m setting us free, Megumi,” you interjected, fixing a fierce gaze on him. “Neither of us wanted this in the first place. And now we can do it. Zen’in must have a better bride in mind for you, or you could also ditch them altogether. We can go our separate ways.”

How had it escalated into this? Weren’t the two of you just spent the night? How did you spew all of these so callously?

Megumi clenched his jaw. “No.”

"Why?!" Now it was your turn to express frustration. Honestly, you really thought he would agree. You had offered him his freedom on a silver platter—so why didn't he take it?

“You are not in the right state of mind,” he asserted, his gaze fixed at you squarely. “You haven’t thought this through. You can't make decisions solely based on your impulses, Sena.”

“I have thought this through, Megumi!”

“Clearly, you haven’t,” he retorted firmly. “If that’s the case, then tell me, should we get a divorce, what would you do?”

You fell into silence, unable to give an immediate response. “It’s—I will—”

“See?” he let out a scoff. “Is your life with me so unbearable that you’re considering a divorce?”

Your brain short-circuited, evidently and truthfully you didn’t think that far ahead. Your primary focus was to alleviate the guilt in your gut, and you believed that returning to where it all began would be better for both of you, especially him.

But was your life with him that miserable? “No.” You stiffened, biting your lower lip. You didn’t want him to think like that. Living with Megumi was far from horrible at all; in fact, it was quite the opposite.

“Then what brought this on?” he inquired once again. His tone remained calm, but it was clear that he was holding his simmering anger back. “We are perfectly fine. So what’s the deal? Give me a straightforward explanation and I’ll agree with you only if you can explain what you will do from then on.”

Why must he do this? Why did he have to be against it so much? It took everything out of you to keep your resolve from breaking.

Your heart couldn't help but soar when he opposed your idea of getting a divorce. You found yourself hoping for something more, with him.

“We are… not fine.” You ran out of arguments to convince him, as the thought of staying suddenly made more sense, against your better judgment. “I… you—you didn’t want to be married to me—”

“But now I do!” His voice rang through the apartment, leaving you momentarily speechless, trying to absorb his words.

Megumi was at his wits end. As surprising as it may seem, he had developed feelings for you, and perhaps now, those feelings had intensified into something more intense. He had these passing thoughts about how to express his feelings, and certainly this wasn't the scenario he had in mind. However, now that things had escalated to this point, he must get this across somehow.

“I know you’re having a hard time. Losing your mother isn’t something you can get over so easily—I get it. I understand that, Sena.”

Tears welled up in your eyes.

“But I promise you,” his unwavering gaze held you captive. “You are going to be fine. We are going to be fine. Forget how we started—we have made it this far regardless of that.”

Staying with you meant he would remain embroiled in the Zen'in's successor struggle, a reality he was fully aware of. But the idea of you leaving was simply inconceivable in his mind.

Now you were openly sobbing. You were happy. You knew it was still wrong, but you couldn’t bring yourself to tell him the whole truth—the binding vow with Gojo. You just can’t.

You had never hoped so bad for a wrong to become right before now.

"You have me," he declared, and Megumi's hand reached for your damp cheek, cradling it gently. When your teary eyes met his, he fondly caressed your cheek.

“I will stay with you.”

That was the breaking point. You lost the hold over your emotions. If you didn't know anything else, one thing was abundantly clear—you had lived for this very moment.

And when Fushiguro Megumi pulled you into a searing kiss, you knew that life as you had known it had come to an end.

Because from now on, through endless maze, fear and loneliness, you placed your trust in him to be by your side.

"Tsk."

Naoya clicked his tongue at the first hearing held at his own Zen'in estate. Most of the elders had gathered in the main hall, with him sitting at the front row. The next seat next to him was empty.

"Can't we just start?" he spat impatiently, glaring particularly at his uncle, Zen'in Ogi—the father of the Maki and Mai—who was the head of the council to determine the next successor of Zen'in clan.

His uncle simply regarded him with a stoic expression. "We'll commence when Fushiguro arrives here."

To be frank, Zen'in Ogi harbored a strong dislike for Naoya. Not only was this young upstart trying to seize the position of the clan head that could be his by the order of seniority, he was incredibly disrespectful too. Given the choice—which he had, anyway—he still preferred Fushiguro even though he was an outsider rather than this manic twat.

"If the bastard doesn't come then it's his loss," Naoya hissed through his teeth. "Why should we wait for him? What a waste of time."

An attendant suddenly went into the room to inform that Fushiguro Megumi couldn't attend as he had prior engagements. Naoya sneered upon hearing that. "See? Even he doesn't take this the least bit seriously."

Zen'in Ogi vowed to wipe that smirk off his face, even if it was the last thing he did. To him, Naoya's behavior and lack of decorum during his brother's funeral was a blatant insult to their proud clan, and there was no way he would let him rule at the top, even though he was his brother's own flesh and blood.

Hence why he took great delight in seeing the shock on his face when he announced that the majority of the votes had gone in favor of Fushiguro instead of him.

"This isn't the final decision, of course," he remarked, casting a glance at Naoya's seething anger. "We will hold two more hearings, and by then, you can still cast your vote for the candidates you favor."

What the actual fuck—

"I advise you to get your act together, Naoya," Ogi whispered to him as the crowd dispersed. "You're hardly demonstrating why we should choose you with your rather... ah, unbecoming behavior."

Naoya clenched both his jaw and fists as his uncle walked past him. The nerve of that rotting bastard!

No one seemed to respect him any longer in this place. It seemed like everyone had started to think he could be overthrown from his rightful place.

So be it then. He just had to make it clear that he was the one in charge.

And when he spotted one of the serving girls, whom he had observed had been following several elders, and even himself, for several days now, Naoya finally had enough and pursued her as she hastened her steps.

But he was naturally faster and grabbed her hair in an attempt to catch her, causing her to yelp.

“Master Naoya!” she cried. “P-Please let me go—!”

“Shut up, you wretch!” he snapped at her with such fury that the girl could only tremble in shock. He then forcibly dragged her by the hair toward the disciplinary pit, paying no heed to her cries and pleas for him to stop.

He flung her across the hard tiles, and the girl curled up in fear. "P-Please... spare me..." she pleaded, her voice trembling with terror.

With an air of dominance, Naoya gazed down at her, and then he ruthlessly stomped on her hand, causing her to scream in agony.

“S-Stop! It hurts!” she sobbed. “P-Please!”

He crouched down, still keeping her hand pinned beneath his shoe.

“I’m acting o-on orders!” she shouted amidst the tears. “M-My mistress is the one w-who told me to come h-here!”

Naoya's lips curled into a sneer as he released his grip on her and then firmly grasped the young girl's chin, forcing her to meet his gaze.

“Now, you fool, tell me everything.”

It was monumentally stupid. Megumi knew it, but couldn’t help but let his face burn in embarrassment regardless.

“Megumi.” You tilted your head to the side, eyes looking at him so innocently, yet hesitantly. “You want us to… uh, share one bedroom?”

The way you pronounced the word “share” was enough to drive him on edge. He knew it. You didn’t want it, but he wanted this, and yet he didn’t want to force you into it.

These three statements that negated each other made him want to crawl back to his room.

But as the saying goes, sometimes you have to fake it until you make it, right?

“Yeah, is there a problem with that?” And so faking his confidence it is.

“T-There is!” you hastily retaliated. “This is too sudden!”

“And what about it? Your bed is big enough for both of us. If not, then the one in my room it is.”

“But!” This inquiry was beyond you. Not that you were totally opposed, but this prompt change of situation left you reeling.

Okay, let us get it straight.

Confessing feelings to each other? Well, yeah, in practice, yes.

Marital status? Still wife and husband. Check.

And so, this was the cue for moving in together next, yes?

At least in the romance novels you read, yes. But quite literally, ever since Megumi’s dramatic declaration—that made you swoon amidst everything else, yes—the two of you found yourselves stuck in an awkward situation once again. He failed to look at you in the eye for two days straight after that, and now out of nowhere, asked you to share a room with him.

“Are you sure?” you asked, idly twirling a strand of your hair with your fingers.

“I am,” he replied instantly. "What's the issue here? We're married. We should have done this right from the start."

“Wouldn’t want you to burst from sheer embarrassment is all,” you quipped, successfully making him fidget. A smile tugged at your lips at his reaction.

"You could hardly even look at me," you added teasingly, and it seemed a vein on his face was on the verge of bursting.

“And you—”

You didn't have the opportunity to add more anecdotes to the list because suddenly your right arm was pulled, and before you could react, you found yourself cornered against the sofa.

"Well," Megumi's face was now inches from yours, his voice slow and laden with an indescribable intensity. His green eyes blinked, and suddenly, you found it hard to breathe. "Now, I'm looking at you, aren't I?"

What… is this situation? You could no longer think, and the only sound you heard was your uncontrollable heartbeats.

Even Megumi himself couldn’t keep the blush from creeping up on his face as he kept his hot gaze on you. When his cheeks began to feel as if they were sizzling and burning, much like the barbecue he had with Yuji the other night, he finally withdrew, moving away slowly. You took a deep breath and exhaled forcefully, your heart still racing.

"Stupid, don't look so scared," he grumbled before tousling the top of your head, causing you to wince.

Now he had truly done it, hadn't he? He had made it glaringly obvious just how hopelessly infatuated he was, or at least he hoped he had conveyed it to you.

“I’m not scared…” You looked away shyly. “Megumi, you idiot.”

“Why am I the idiot? You’re the one being so clueless.”

In his eyes, you appeared so petite and vulnerable. The way you puckered your lips made him want to pin you to the wall.

It was unlike anything he had felt before. This urge to protect, make you happy, and ruin you at the same time was just too much.

But in the end, the first two always won.

"Okay, forget about it," he said afterwards, prompting you to look up. "We don't have to share a room if you're that uncomfortable about it."

“Uh, but—” now you were the one stammering. “No, it’s—okay…”

He raised an eyebrow, not understanding what you meant, so you took a gulp of breath, suppressing your embarrassment.

“Let’s sleep together from now on,” you declared. “In the same room, okay? I’m okay with it…”

“Really, you don’t have to—”

“I want to.”

A reminiscent of what he told you just two days ago. You couldn't forget how those three simple words made you feel, as if you were granted a fresh opportunity at life, despite the hardships you'd endured.

In the ensuing five seconds, you locked eyes and then erupted into a chorus of laughter.

“It’s so stupid, why is it so hard?” you sighed, smiling all the way. “We can’t be stuck at this stage forever.”

Megumi looked at your smile and, once again, tenderly placed his hand on your head.

“Yeah, we probably shouldn’t,” he muttered. “But even this is enough for me though.”

“What is?”

A gentle, weightless sensation filled his chest, a welcome relief after enduring two weeks of shared suffering. Seeing you no longer as tormented fueled his desire to to sustain that newfound happy expression on your face.

“Your smile,” he replied simply. “Just keep smiling. That’s all that matters.”

You swore you felt your heart leap out of your chest at his genuine words. But, damn you, you concealed your emotions the only way you knew how.

“Okay, so now you can’t deny it any longer,” you huffed in a playful condescending manner. “You’re positively smitten by me, correct, dear husband?”

A sheepish snort escaped from him. “Yeah, yeah, wife. I’m all yours.”

Megumi was eager to walk down this road with you from now on. It wouldn't be without its challenges, as there were still many things for you to tackle. Your mother’s murderer, Tsumiki’s curse, Zen’in’s mess. Through it all, he had you in his thoughts. And as for you...

You were content if this dream would last just a little bit longer.

next : love unspoken

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[unofficial-underfell]

Hey guys, I've been thinking about making this post for a long time and I think its finally time I do so. After realizing that some of my last work was done over a year ago, I don't think I can really ignore it anymore. While I haven't quite thrown in the towel on this quite yet, it's pretty evident to me and I'm sure to everyone who still follows this blog that my fervor for the project has drastically decreased. And has been kind of dead for a while. The comic has not been a priority to me, or posting online much at all actually. I did some soul searching and found that I'd started relying on outside approval for my art instead of doing art for the sake of wanting to tell a story and express myself throughout my work. I have limited energy and depression and sometimes it feels like i get such little progress done even though it takes all of my energy. While I'm trying to go to the gym more and build better habits my energy levels and mood still have a lot to be desired, and I'd rather use the limited energy I have to work on something I'm more passionate about.

I've been trying to grow my skills and absorb more stories and I've moved around a lot and started to listen to what I really felt, and I found that a lot of the art I want to focus on deals with heavier and more mature topics. I do love this story, and all of the characters and I feel like I could make a really clever subversion of what is expected from an Underfell comic. But I feel like in these uncertain times with the world and with all of the stuff going on right now, I'd like to use my energy to work on stories that hit closer to the things that I feel are important. So that's why I've not been posting much.

I'm working on a book, and I've actually got quite a lot of progress done on it, but because of all the horror stories online about people stealing author's original works, I'm kind of holding off on publishing any chapters before I can copyright the first draft of the novel. So my online activity will still be pretty scarce for a bit, though I'll still post occasionally on my @cosmicpixel01 account. I'll try better to not be so radio silent though lol. Even if that means I'll post something boring about my dog or books I'm reading just so everyone knows I'm still alive.

I don't want to call it quits on the story. But I also feel like you guys have been kept waiting to see what happens for a really long time, and that makes me feel so guilty. I will try to finish up the pages I have in the works, and I'm probably going to switch to a different format that is some drawings, some writing to finish the story. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to finish it the way I intended for you guys, even with all of the support and kind words and even the fanart that I've kept in a folder on my desktop. I am letting a lot of you down, but I feel like the radio silence is probably more irresponsible than just going out and saying something. And I'm sorry I've kept you all waiting for a not-so-happy update on the blog.

I hope that some of you will continue to follow me for some of my other exploits and see whatever other things I have going on, but I understand that you all followed me for Undertale so I don't want you to feel any sort of guilt if you decide not to. I'm just happy you all supported me for so long.

I'll try to work on this blog again soon, and if anyone has any questions, my asks are open, though I'll probably keep the asks private. Until then I hope everyone stays safe out there. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

-Avery

[eepyuii]

frostbite — pt. 16

pairing ; childe x gender neutral!reader

content ; childhood friends to “rivals” to lovers, slow burn

cw ; reader spiraling a little bit, typical violence, very brief mentions of pain and blood

notes ; guys. so uhm. i don’t know what the fuck happened

while i never planned to stop writing frostbite entirely, i was sure that it would still take a while for me to actually *want* to continue it, as i’ve been endlessly burnt out from college and in a little bit of an artistic block (not to mention falling quite a bit out of genshin after natlan came out, but who’s surprised)

like i shit you not, i might genuinely have been possessed last night because i just opened my draft for the latest chapter (that got started in fucking SEPTEMBER of last year btw) and just. started writing. unfortunately that doesn’t mean i’ll start posting regularly again, i might never put out chapters as quickly as i did when i started frostbite but just know that i HAVE NOT GIVEN UP ON THIS!!!!!!! GENSHIN IS TEMPORARY BUT TARTAGLIA IS FOREVER!!!!! HUZZAH!!!!!!!!!!

(oh yeah and there’s a lot of wriothesley shenanigannery in this one. yeah this is heading where you think it is, sorry guys)

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he’s so close, you can almost feel his gloved hand held within your own.

it’s as though you’re children playing chase again, only this time you follow his glaring red scarf and his fiery head of hair through the rusted hallways of an underwater prison, rather than the snow covered field of your childhood.

he specters through the walls of the fortress, disappearing and reappearing far ahead of you just as you’re about to reach him. you call out to him ceaselessly even though it proves futile— either he’s ignoring you or entranced by something else. finally, his pace comes to a halt as he turns to a hallway overgrown with moss. a cool breeze wafts in from the hallway and as you step further in, finding that the hallway ends in a pool of glowing water. primordial seawater.

even though you’re fully aware that neither you nor him would be affected by the primordial waters, a bad feeling settles in your stomach and you rush to stop him. your pleas continue to fall on deaf ears— he steps closer and closer, until his boots touch the mouth of the pool.

you’re so close… so close that you decide to leap to close in the distance between the two of you. he’s at the tip of your fingers… and then—!

fucking ouch.

you land on the cold, unforgiving metal ground of your room with a harsh slam. gods, what are you, five years old? falling off the bed because of a dream?

certainly doesn’t help that the scenery you’re rudely woken up to is the sad, grimy bronze walls that only remind you that you’re still in prison for a ridiculous fake crime. suddenly, the situation settles into the rest of your body— as the fatigue and ache bleed into your muscles from all the backbreaking work you did yesterday for the sake pathetic little credit coupons, added onto the pain currently spreading on your side from your fall.

you groan tiredly. back to the grind, you suppose.

a lazy hand reaches out to the table next to your bed to count the amount of coupons you’ve gathered in the last few days. ugh, still not enough to buy the information from that idiot guy, vidoc. you consider your options while trying your best to stretch your muscles— the pain that shoots your limbs is unspeakable.

okay, so no heavy-work today. while that is the best way to earn a bunch of coupons, your body most certainly cannot handle it. if only there were painkillers around the fortress…

wait.

—

“now, keep it compressed with these bandages, ice it whenever you can and- obviously, don’t put too much force on it.” you finish tightening up the gauze on some poor inmate’s sprained wrist as he listens intently. once the gauze is certifiably fastened on his wrist, you take the opportunity to wrap both your hands around the joint and ever so slightly activate your cryo powers in an impromptu measure of icing the sprain.

“got it, thanks, doc.” the man nods appreciatively, hearing the nickname ‘doc’ again leaves you with a long lost warm feeling. for the first in months, you finally feel like you’re back in function— simply tending to others’ medical needs, even if it is just you working temporarily at the fortress of meropide’s infirmary.

sigewinne writes down reports and notes on her clipboard swiftly, having allowed you to cover the incoming patients while she busies herself with paperwork. only for a moment does she look up to watch yet another inmate trot out the infirmary with a satisfied air to them. she throws you a pleasant grin and hops up to proudly slap you on… well, what would sentimentally be your shoulder, but the highest she reaches is your hip.

“good work, y/n! it’s not very often that someone volunteers to work at the infirmary with me, so i’m quite grateful for your help!” the melusine praises.

you chuckle sheepishly as you neatly put away the equipment you just used. “it’s my pleasure, miss sigewinne. this kind of stuff is almost therapeutic for me.”

sigewinne giggles before she looks off thoughtfully— shooting up as she suddenly remembers something. “ah! speaking of therapeutic, i have to find the duke and speak to him about the package of romaritime flowers i-“

heavy footsteps approach the infirmary, ones that seem almost familiar to you, as they quickly reveal to come from the duke himself, as if summoned. you jump slightly once his imposing figure enters the room, moments from your last meeting flashing before your eyes. hoping to remain unseen, you choose to divert your attention to the patient who rests off a fever in the corner of the infirmary and turn your back to the other two, checking the inmate’s temperature.

“wriothesley, perfect timing! i was just on my way to speak to you about the order of supplies i placed.”

“well good morning to you too, sigewinne,” the duke muses. “mm, yes, i’ll have to check with the front desk and see about— …oh! good morning, y/n, didn’t expect to find you working at the infirmary.”

god dammit.

you turn around slowly like a child with their hand caught in the cookie jar and throw wriothesley a tight-lipped, awkward smile before returning to your previous task. the duke doesn’t seem to notice your sheepishness as he continues to watch you with a smile.

“well, it is nice to see you in your element.” he comments into the otherwise painfully awkward air of the infirmary. the notion that wriothesley would ever be amused by seeing you do medical work, that he would ever even regard your existence as anything more than another fatuus residing in his prison, leaves a foreign fuzzy sensation across your chest.

“say, would you like to join me this afternoon for another talk?”

the question surprises you entirely, as your last talk hadn’t exactly been the most casual and innocent of talks… you frown towards wriothesley accordingly and he seems to immediately understand your concern.

“don’t worry, you can choose the tea this time.” he jokes, thankfully sigewinne doesn’t seem to think much more about the implications of it.

well, who are you to deny the duke of meropide, so you answer with a simple ‘sure’. the fortress’ head nurse senses the thickness in the air and moves the conversation back to where she had left it off and steps up to the exit of the infirmary.

“well! we should get going to the front desk, those romaritime flowers must be stored properly before they start withering. that is, if they’re even here at all.”

you hear sigewinne’s voice grow quieter and quieter as she leaves and turn back, once more, to your function. though… as you dip a small towel in warm water to put against the feverish inmate’s forehead, you realize only one set of footsteps was heard leaving the infirmary. a sudden warmth creeps up from the back of your neck and settles on your cheeks.

“…wriothesley?” you hear sigewinne call out from far away.

“r-right, yes.”

heavy, thumping footsteps leave the room— from right behind you. why is your heart even beating faster? this is nothing.

it’s so absolutely nothing that you entirely forget about it within your dedication to taking care of the infirmary while sigewinne is gone and the hours pass by in a flash. as you send off your latest patient, the emptiness of the infirmary room settles differently. there’s a certain air of uneasiness, a familiar chill in your spine— it instinctively tells you that you’re being watched. shoulders tense, you look around the bend of the large metal pipe that constitutes the hallway, finding no sign of life. the gnawing suspicion in your gut doesn’t leave you still, yet you choose to brush it off and occupy yourself with something else.

“sergeant y/n l/n from the medical division, eh?” a taunting voice calls out from behind you. should’ve listened to your gut.

you turn coldly to face two smug inmates. at first you presume it’s just some regular wingus and dingus who’ve got a particular distaste for fatui and decided to pick on you to fulfill their little uneventful lives rotting away in a prison. and then… you look down to see a familiar symbol in the form of a silver brooch hanging from one of the two’s pocket. and his buddy’s got one too.

oh— oh they’re even more pathetic than you thought.

and therefore not worthy of your time, so you simply roll your eyes with a demeaning scoff and slide past the two goons to make your way out the infirmary. only before you can get away, a painfully firm grip latches onto your elbow and pulls you back.

“woah! not so fast there, we’ve still gotta talk-“

“has nobody taught you to respect your superiors? you called me sergeant, did you not? now act like it.” you spit venomously.

the second fatuus chuckles smugly. “and haven’t you learned that none of that bullshit applies here? we’re all equals in the fortress of meropide.” choosing not to make a comeback, the silence allows for the two to scornfully look you up and down, as if scrutinizing a roach on the floor— you merely roll your eyes away from their gaze. one of them scoffs. the one holding your arm tightens his grip cruelly, forcing an involuntary wince out of you.

“dottore’s little lap dog.. agh s-shit-!“ he sneers, though barely as the last word rolls disdainfully off his tongue, searing rage shoots up your spine and into your trapped arm. it’s like a reflex you don’t control and you find enough strength to twist your arm in his grip and in return, grasping onto his throat tightly.

just like he did before, you continuously tighten your grip mercilessly, as the poor jackass still tries to find the time to react to your movement— choking on the air and desperately trying to suck air back into his throat.

“don’t you ever, ever, even fucking think of calling me that again, you-“ you snarl rabidly, as ice uncontrollably emanates from your hand and spreads onto the fatuus’ skin with a cruel hiss. he immediately tries recoil away from you, pained gasp struggling to leave his throat. as if feeling the icy sting yourself, you recoil away from him, finally awaking from your sudden fit of anger.

you look down at your own hand— it looks foreign to you, like a hand that would hurt some, while douchey, blameless fool isn’t a hand that would belong to you. cryo energy still buzzes under your skin and leaves the muscles in your palm slightly spasming. turning back up toward the two fatui, they look at you incredulously, sneering at you like you’re a rabid animal that briefly lost control.

you feel utterly suffocated.

vision spotting and ears ringing, your feet take you far from the infirmary hallway before you even realize. when you feel like you’ve composed yourself enough, you look around to realize you’ve ended up at the administrative center of the fortress— it’s barren of people and deafeningly silent, sparing the ever-present hum of machinery that emanates dully from every corner of this prison, likely due to the fact that most inmates had already gone back to their quarters to rest at this time of day. you merely stand there, taking in the sheer emptiness of the floor and letting the sound of your own heartbeat thrum inside your ears without a certain course of action.

your eyes wander around aimlessly and eventually, land on the elevator that leads down to the pankration ring. you’d never given the ring much thought, as it seemed like nothing you’d ever want to engage in simply by your nature. but then again… choking someone with your bare hand wasn’t something of your nature, but you still did it. perhaps a more, let’s say, active way to cool your nerves doesn’t sound so bad after all. you didn’t even realize you had nerves to tend to in the first place, but it’s not like being in prison is a fucking cake walk.

you space out as the elevator starts descending to the pankration ring, mind filling with plans of what else you had or could do in the fortress tomorrow to investigate childe’s disappearance. you think of places to go and people to talk to as you absentmindedly step off the elevator and into the ring— barely paying attention to the obscenely obvious other presence inside. a particularly heavy thud, like a hard punch, is what snaps back to reality and your chest seems to stutter, stunned at the sight.

it’s him.

wriothesley, the duke of meropide, throwing the most ruthless of hits against the poor, beaten-down dummy inside the boxing ring at the center of the room. he moves and swings like a professional boxer, body fully and utterly committed to the practice— so much so that he doesn’t even notice you, facial expression intense and focused.

his back is slightly faced toward you and it’s only then that you realize that he’s fucking shirtless. rippling, shifting muscles compose his back, decorated with various scars and twinkling beads of sweat. you’re ashamed to admit that you find yourself entranced by the sight. and so you won’t admit it. before you allow your jaw to drop too low at what’s before you, you shake your shoulders as if to brush away your fluster— the fluttering sound of your clothes is impossibly quiet… yet the duke seems to hear it from where he stands inside the ring and pauses his task abruptly.

he turns around and the way he shifts is almost in slow motion. wriothesley prepares a hardened face to show to whoever has dared to interrupt his private training session but the moment it actually lands on your figure, his entire body seems to soften in its resolve. you hate that the relaxation of his muscles is heavily accentuated and highlighted by the light that hangs over the boxing ring.

“y/n! …i must say, i really did not expect to find you here.” wriothesley chuckles breathlessly, eyes twinkling with pleased surprise.

you despise how heavily he pants from exhaustion and how you can’t seem to stop watching him do so. it’s a miracle that your scattered mind actually remembers that you had agreed to meet him for tea, which as seen by the late hours of night, did not happen. what is wrong with you today?

you choke on nothing and clear your throat to mask your lack of composure. “ah-! y-yes uhm… to be honest, i never expected to ever want to come to the pankration ring either but-“

the image of the terrified fatuus shivering beneath your hand flashes punishingly bright behind your eyes.

“-but i guess i might as well try it out while i’m here.” your smile is forced.

regardless of whether or not wriothesley notices that, he flashes you a warm smile and extends a welcoming hand. you reluctantly step up the stairs and inside the ring, feeling immediately out of element. you idiot, why did you even agree to this? why did you even think it was a good idea before coming down here? yes, you know how to fight in combat but you’re not… a fighter.

you fight if you must but you don’t resort to violence arbitrarily… at least, you didn’t. the duke, as if sensing your turmoil, puts a well-timed comforting hand on your tense shoulder as his other one encouragingly holds out a roll of hand wrap.

“hey, even if this isn’t usually your cup of tea,” he jests, obviously not taking your ‘ditch’ to his invite to heart— you still feel guilty about it. “you should still try to relieve whatever tension you have. and it seems like you’ve got enough tension to bring you all the way down here.”

he’s so… friendly. you don’t even know what you’ve done to deserve such lighthearted familiarity from someone like the literal warden of the prison you’re locked in. even as you struggle to wrap the hand wraps properly, wriothesley offers to help without a thought. like he’s known you for years— like it’s no problem that he’s still fucking shirtless in front of you. you feel dizzy.

the duke doesn’t even ask if you know how to fight or not, your unspoken sergeant title answers his unspoken question. he merely watches as you swing experimentally at the dummy, pausing periodically to allow your knuckles to throb and hum silently with each strike against the tough, worn surface of the dummy. eventually, you pause less often, you hit faster and harder, you stop thinking about your next swing. subconsciously, your face adopt the same intense expression you’d seen wriothesley wear when you arrived and your teeth grit with animalistic instinct.

it’s nearly an out-of-body experience, you barely realize what you’re doing and just relish in the way the strain in your arms and the sting in your knuckles turns into an electric rush. you don’t even focus on why you were stressed in the first place— the fact that you’re in prison, the workload, the investigation, the two fatui stooges you encountered today, childe’s disappearance… even wriothesley seems to disappear from view despite being palpably present and shamelessly intrigued by your commitment. you might even allow yourself to admit that you’re enjoying this, that you maybe just a little bit understand why childe loves this so fervently. now that you think about it, you’re 1000% sure that childe spent most of his free time in the prison absolutely demolishing the scoreboard at the pankration ring— you chuckle mentally at that image. unfortunately, that’s all the amusement your brain allows you to have before you’re overcome with anguish as you’re reminded of the fact that childe is still missing. at this point in your life, you’re certain you’ll grow grey hairs at a ridiculously young age from the sheer stress that childe unintentionally brings you.

it seems that you cannot spare even a single breath where you’re not worrying over him. worrying over his whereabouts, his health, his utter lack of self-preservation or limitation, his thirst for battle… his dizzyingly beautiful eyes, his endearing freckles, his breathtaking battle scars, his hearty laughter… his suffocating proximity to you when you were patching up his injuries in the hotel bathro—

“woah, y/n! h-hold on!” wriothesley calls out and suddenly you’re back at the pankration ring, except now the dummy in front of you has brand new fist-shaped bloodstains and your knuckles hurt like fucking hell.

as your chest heaves up and down intensely with desperation to regulate your breathing, your heart hammering like never before, the duke approaches your stunned figure with caution. he gently takes one of your aching hands in his to inspect it, feathery touches over your knuckles. after the train of thought you had gotten into, wriothesley’s gesture leaves the butterflies in your stomach utterly confused and fluttering as if they’re short-circuiting, your brain in the same state.

you might pass out.

within two blinks, your surroundings have warped into a familiar office and a teacup is placed in front of you.

taglist ; @kentply @osaemu @rain-and-a-nice-nap @koichirana

[writtenbyjeanofarc]

#!! - 𝑰𝑵 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑪𝑶𝑼𝑹𝑻 𝑶𝑭 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑪𝑹𝑰𝑴𝑺𝑶𝑵 𝑸𝑼𝑬𝑬𝑵 — 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐧𝐞 ; ᴄᴏʀᴏɴᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ᴅᴀʏ

(Cross-posted from my AO3)

CHAPTER ONE - CHAPTER TWO - CHAPTER THREE

𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖗𝖊: smut.

𝖕𝖆𝖎𝖗𝖎𝖓𝖌: Griffith X You (fem! Reader)

𝖘𝖞𝖓𝖔𝖕𝖘𝖎𝖘:

Having been spoiled by your father as an only child after your mother’s death, there existed you, a young, yet rebellious maiden known amongst Midland as Princess Scarlet. Being the subject of envy by commoners who wanted nothing more than to overthrow the kingdom, you were rather…..indifferent. As a princess, you exercised pride in your achievements, deeming you fit for the role of succeeding your father on the throne.

Even after your father’s death caused by poisoning, your dream to have your own kingdom never faltered in the slightest. In fact, ruling over Midland with an iron fist has been made easy and simple considering your royal blood.

Subsequently, your ambitious demeanor and philosophy attracted none other than the military genius who led a group of mercenaries known as the Band of The Hawk. Sir Griffith; a man who never fell short of what were to be defined as a noble, if it were not for his common blood.

To put it simply, Griffith never planned on building his empire overnight. Instead, he harbored ulterior motives where he would rather…..bend you, the Queen, to his liking before taking over Midland.

….And the consequences of YOU having a fragile ego never ceased to reveal itself.

𝖈𝖜: none as of now.

𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖗’𝖘 𝕹𝖔𝖙𝖊:

No smut for the first chapter!

To minors: this space isn’t for you. Berserk is a warning in itself. Go away. Do not interact.

Anyways, I’m back with a new fic and it’s basically my own version while still keeping the canon verse of Berserk clear.

In this verse, expect certain things:

— Princess Charlotte does NOT exist.

— YOU are the Princess/Queen of Midland.

— The story will mainly focus on Griffith, not Guts.

Before commenting, I would like to caution you for potential rape/non-con elements (it’s Griffith we’re talking about here) to be depicted in later chapters of the story.

What I write is pure fantasy, and is mostly just me projecting on my original character (in this case, Queen Scarlet) who has a rather peculiar relationship with Griffith.

Anyways, grab some popcorn, and chill a little while we watch our original character slowly get taken advantage of by the devil himself.

The Kingdom of Midland. Such is a name given to the central region of the Physical World where nobles dominate and savages eliminate. One had the luxury of resting within the comfort of their own home while dining with only the finest cuisine made known to man. The other had to hustle and kill for the sake of money and survival…....while for potential evildoers and traitors, the sake of achieving their dream.

It was your coronation day after all, one of the most awaited events in all of Midland’s history. Following your father’s death caused by an incident of poisoning, the nobles immediately turn to you as a successor to the throne. You were a bit nervous, so to speak, but ready to accept your new role and give your speech as the newly appointed ruler of Midland.

It was already sunset, the halls decorated with red roses, bushes, and your favorite type of flower, the Amaryllis. You just loved the sight of red the way you liked your tea. Red, so to speak, was your favorite color. It just looks and feels powerful, like the way sunlight pierces its way through your eyes. You liked shoving your presence down people’s throats, to make them remember your name as you rejoiced in your own superiority as the new Queen.

Red was the visual embodiment of your dream—to rule and render yourself capable of building your own empire. Because of that, the King, your very own father, feared for your safety. And boy, was that prediction true.

Not only was your safety compromised, but prior to meeting the White Hawk who was addressed as Sir Griffith, things went downhill after that encounter as a sudden number of royal guards dropped dead. Not only were you disgusted by the smell of blood that filled the hallways the week before your coronation, but the five words whispered to your ear was what sent chills across your spine. Those five words made you shiver in questionable fear despite you taking it as just an empty threat.

“You belong to me, Princess.”

And then came the surge of mysterious events such as your father’s death.

Supposedly, you were expected to be excited for such an event like the coronation ceremony as you longed all your life to become Queen, but something about the whole situation didn’t feel right. You were at a loss for words, being unable to understand why your father was poisoned in an instant and how planning the ceremony felt rushed.

You shivered at the thought of meeting the Band of the Hawk once more, immediately suspecting that one of them killed your father.

“Our beloved guests, our crowning guests, respected parents of the nobles, and that of the civilians. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.” announced the event speaker of the ceremony. “Once again, we have gathered here to witness the coronation ceremony of the Royal Family to be headed by Queen Scarlet and the rest of the officials appointed to serve her Majesty. Kindly rise for the ceremony proper.”

A huge audience of youngsters stood to give thanks towards your family for a job well done in leadership, singing songs of praise as time passed by. You were, of course, getting quite the goosebumps knowing your time is up as a princess. However, you can’t help but falter, thinking of your father’s untimely demise just about two weeks ago.

You were lost in thought, unable to pay attention to the songs sung in honor of you. Something was very wrong. You sweat and panted hard, not because you didn’t know what to say or do given the situation, but because you didn’t want to actually meet up with Griffith and the rest of his comrades due to some suspicions about the leader’s motives.

“Before we start, may I request everyone to observe silence as the ceremony begins to maintain its solemnity. Reserve your ‘hoorays’ for the latter part of the coronation. Thank you very much for your full cooperation.”

The rest of the coronation ceremony followed. You were nervous, biting your nails as you slowly prepared your speech in front of thousands. You knew Griffith would be watching

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Alas, it was your turn to give out a speech that serves as a public declaration of your aims, intentions, and actions to be taken to further improve the economic and sociocultural growth of Midland.

Standing up, you could feel the eyes of crowds searching you from head to toe, but none of them ever gave you the impression that someone was truly watching you.

At the exterior of the venue, there sneaked a young man with white, flowing hair and a pair of blue eyes. It was him. Griffith. He didn’t make his own presence clear before you, he covered his tracks very well. But, little did he know, you could peek at his silhouette from afar. Knowing he made his way past the guards with extreme caution showed his prowess in strategy and disarming opponents with great ease.

Yes, he just wanted to hear your speech. After all, knowing how someone would open up about a fraction of their lives would be crucial in undergoing one’s plan to achieving their dreams, yes?

This was your moment. You let out a deep breath and spoke clearly as you cleared your throat.

“Greetings, my beloved fellowmen. It’s been a pleasure having to meet with you all to this very moment.” you greeted the audience with a friendly, approachable tone. “Throughout this memorable day, I was able to discern all your prayers dedicated to me and my family, especially in honor of my father’s passing. As an inherent successor to the throne, I have maintained a significant awareness through the years that my people, spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world, were united to support me in the task to which I have now been dedicated with such solemnity.”

The muffled voice of your speech was rendered audible to Griffith from the outskirts of the palace. He was perhaps….fascinated by your rather….pushy attitude on things. It didn’t take long before he palmed the area between his hips, hiding such an unsightly appearance as he began to fantasize about you under his control. He wanted nothing more than to dissect you in every detail possible, to know your deepest fears and motives of having to rule such a flawed kingdom. But little did you know, was that he wanted this kingdom all to himself.

“The ceremonies you have seen today are ancient, but some of their origins are hidden in the mists of the past. Their spirit and meaning still rise from the flames of finiteness. Perhaps, they still shine more brightly than we’ve expected them to do so. I have pledged allegiance with all my heart that I shall lead this kingdom, uplifting it further to claiming a thousand more victories than you would ever anticipate. Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.”

Griffith’s eyes narrowed as he hid behind the doors alongside the two guards who were apparently slain before they could even fight back.

He wanted you.

And there was nothing more satisfying than breaking one of the strongest, most powerful women who once took an interest in the art of swordsmanship. But he would rather not challenge you to a duel; not because he underestimated your capabilities, but because he saw such barbaric acts to be unbefitting of a lady with high status.

An hour later, trumpets played as the Grim Reapers of the Battlefield were to be promoted as bodyguards, yes, bodyguards, of your kingdom. The King trusted you to this group of mercenaries who promised nothing short of protecting your integrity and wellbeing as the princess. But one thing’s for sure, it’s that their leader was bound to be missing.

You stepped down from the stage to observe your audience for any problems which may arise from the White Hawk’s absence.

“Wait, where’s Griffith? But he was just here about minutes ago!” Rickert exclaimed. “He can’t just be wandering out in the open like this! Griffith! Hang in there! We’re on our way!”

“Cut the crap.” Guts said, alerting his fellow comrades. “There must be a way to proceed with the ceremony without Griffith being of any concern.”

“But Guts-”

Recognizing and appreciating your bodyguards (or perhaps, some new friends) wasn’t all that bad. Perhaps you were intimidated by some of the mercenaries, but they played an integral part of your big day.

It was only one moment within that band that spooked you, it was the White Hawk revealing himself—it was Griffith. By that moment when Griffith claimed you to be his, you began to not take those words lightly and managed to develop a slight sense of fear. What did he exactly mean by that?

You brushed off your thoughts on the matter and shook hands with nearly all the members, with Griffith being an exception (obviously). Rumor has it that he’s still hiding where the sun doesn’t shine, covering his tracks in order to reveal himself before you in the very end.

And God forbid what kind of plans he had for you that night.

[ninliane]

how I think CANON kageyama really thinks about romance based on facts

This is more on just character analysis and observation but this is all speculation because if I'm being honest as a former Haikyuu x reader writer, I think he is the most mischaracterized and has potential for a different type of x reader, rather than typical romance.

Also I'm saying this as a Kageyama fan! This is just my thoughts jotted down hehe

I don't think Kageyama really had the chance to experience romance. Ever. I mean I could be wrong but based on what we we've seen there wasn't really time for it or even a single mention on it

Though given multiple chances to show it, he never showed any outright attraction to anyone outside of volleyball. Obviously this is not a shojo manga, it's a sports one but there are still multiple times where some sort of attraction has been shown towards characters.

He is unfazed by Kiyoko in a season 1 scene, he never fawns over any of the managers the way other characters do. (The only exception is when Saeko introduces herself and he and Hinata get excited) this isnt rly important tho, a lot of character dont do this

the only time he has ever been excited or passionate is when it comes to volleyball, the very reason why he stuck so close to hinata in the first place (this could argue for kagehina ((so true)) but that's a separate post lol)

HOWEVER he's also not repulsed by attraction towards him, as shown in the bonus chapter when he's aware that he and Atsumu are referred to by fans as the "Ikemen Players" and that people watch him for that; he says he's all for it because it get's people into volleyball

But the CORE REASON on why I think he never thought about romance is because he outright states in season 4 that he's not good at emotion, and his past. He likely does not know the feeling and even with friends he was still learning on friendship, but he wants to learn! (that's probably why he was so keen on asking oikawa for help in kitagawa-daichii)

Anyway so conclusion as an x reader writer, would he be datable? I mean it's not impossible. After all we hardly see his life outside of volleyball, it would just be challenging, just like getting him to play on a team. In fact it would even be cute to see him think about it.

I wrote all this bc I think it would be interesting to see this kageyama in fics, instead of the usual tsundere/constantly getting mad and embarrassed ver of him (me,,I used to write him like this,,,)

Now how would I write canon Kageyama off with staying true to his given character as much as possible?

I think he would be very calm and nonchalant about it. They've shown us that he's very aware of his emotional weaknesses in understanding but that he's ALWAYS willing to try and connect with others.

So while I think he can most definitely live his life without romance, I think that he is bound to think about it at least once and contemplate it. He might even be open to trying it for the sake of trying something that's so common with others, but in my opinion he will always love volleyball more than anything else, and that's not a terrible thing at all.

[weemssapphic]

Hi lovely! Got so excited when I saw your requests was open again, your writing is so addicting 😍

I’ve had this idea since I saw a post with a gif of Larissa holding a teaching pen and I can’t stop thinking about it.

What if Larissa was actually teaching anatomy one day at the school you being the assistant teacher for that specific class and at the same time you being secretly in a relationship with her. So as she teaches the class you become more and more turned on, while she talks about the body not being able to control yourself. Ending up having to take Larissa to her private rooms, saying “teach me anatomy” and Larissa be like “didn’t you pay any attention to me earlier” while getting you to “learn anatomy” on her body. Larissa receiving/reader giving, real smutty and hot! Kinks are more than welcome too, hope it makes sense! x if you won’t, it’s totally okay ❤️

Hello ❤️ thank you so much for the compliment and for the request - I'm so sorry that it took me so long to write this (I wasn't very happy with my first draft and I'm super against posting something I hate). But I hope you enjoy it 🫶🏼

Teach Me

Larissa Weems x f!reader

Words: ~3.3k

Content/warnings: nsfw (smut) - choking, authority kink, praise kink, hair pulling, cunnilingus, vaginal fingering, strap-on use

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

“Good morning, class! I’ll be taking over this week’s lessons until Ms. Hanson is back from her sick leave. Today we’ll be going over last week’s exam, and then if we have time we’ll start chapter 8. Any questions?” Met with a brief silence, Larissa continued. “Excellent. Let’s start, shall we?”

Larissa nodded over at you, a small sign for you as the assistant teacher to make your way down the rows of desks and hand the students back their graded tests. Some of them groaned, some squealed in delight - once you’d finished your task, you made your way back to the front of the room, making eye contact with Larissa as you did so. You found her watching you with a faint smirk and a quirked eyebrow.

God, she was so hot when she did that. The smirk painted on those luscious red lips started a small flame in your abdomen - the blue eyes that bore into your own held just a smidge of teasing amusement as you visibly shivered. Larissa knew just what she was doing to you, she always did - her eyes briefly flicked down your body, drinking in your form, and you felt yourself flush.

The two of you had been in a relationship for several months now, choosing to keep it a secret from your students and most of your coworkers for the sake of professionalism. It was normally an easy secret to keep as, apart from staff meetings, your professional interactions were limited to none - especially in front of the students. Today, however, Larissa was taking over the class you normally assisted for, which was equally delightful and a little nerve-wracking.

Larissa was a force to be reckoned with. You’d seen her address the entire school plenty of times as principal, but there was something about seeing her take control of a classroom that was unbelievably arousing. She spoke with such passion, making sure to involve the students and encourage them - somehow, she managed to create a collaborative environment where even the shyest of students felt comfortable enough to speak up.

You couldn’t help but think that, if you’d had a teacher like her when you were younger, maybe you’d have learned a thing or two in anatomy class - perhaps even enjoyed the subject.

Or maybe not, you reasoned, as your eyes fell to Larissa’s backside, perfectly displayed in her form-fitting dress, when she leaned over her desk to rifle through a stack of papers. Maybe you wouldn’t have been able to focus on a single damned word.

And as anticipated, as the lesson progressed, you found it harder and harder to concentrate. You tried, you really did - keeping your eyes mostly on the students or on your notes, rather than on Larissa, trying to soak up every word that was being said in case your assistance was needed. This proved more difficult than you thought it would, as even Larissa’s voice, authoritative yet soft, served to get you worked up. But you were almost successful - until Larissa found that she had just enough time left in the lesson to start chapter 8 and reached into the drawer of her desk to pull out a pointer.

You watched, mesmerized, as she extended it and walked up to the blackboard. If anyone were to ask you what was drawn up there, you wouldn’t have been able to say, even though you’d prepared the lesson yourself due to Ms. Hanson’s absence - your mind went blank as your eyes were glued to Larissa’s hands. Long, red-tipped fingers gripped the pointer firmly, flexing around the little stick. Her other hand waved around animatedly as she spoke.

You squeezed your thighs together, growing more uncomfortable by the second as the dampness between your legs grew. You’d always loved how she spoke with her hands - right now, you couldn’t help but ponder what else she could be doing with them. How those long fingers could reach deep inside of you, curling against your-

The shrill sound of the bell ripped you from your trance, signaling the end of the lesson. Students began to rise, gathering at the door to shuffle out of the classroom and to the cafeteria for lunch. You swallowed hard, your eyes finding Larissa at her desk as she packed away her laptop and some papers.

You were on your feet the second the last student had closed the door behind themselves, taking long strides towards Larissa’s desk. She raised her head and smiled at you.

“Darling, I-”

Your lips met hers in a desperate, sloppy kiss, a needy moan clawing its way out of your throat. Larissa let out a chuckle as you deepened the kiss, her hands coming up to cup your cheeks as she pulled back.

“What was that for?” she asked playfully, humor dancing in her eyes. “Not that I’m complaining…” Her lips curled up into a smirk.

“That was for how hot you look teaching.” Your breaths came out in ragged puffs as you captured her lips once again. This time, Larissa let out a soft moan, fisting the front of your shirt and pulling you closer.

“We have a few hours until the next class… Everyone else is at lunch,” you mumbled against her lips.

“And what would you like to do with all that free time?” Larissa’s voice was low and raspy - it only served to turn you on further.

“You could teach me anatomy?”

“Were you not paying attention earlier?” Larissa teased.

“Nope,” you murmured. “I think I need a private tutor.”

“And you’re certain I’m not too distracting?” she purred.

“Rissa…” It came out whinier than you intended, but that didn’t appear to matter much: Larissa grinned against your lips, pressing one final kiss to them before allowing you to drag her through empty corridors all the way to her private quarters.

Larissa had you pinned against the door the second it closed behind you. Her hips pushed into yours as she clicked the lock, and then her hands were on either side of your head, trapping you against the oak as her lips found your neck. She sucked at your pulse point, her teeth grazing over the sensitive skin and leaving goosebumps in their wake.

“Tell me, darling,” she purred, her voice dropping an octave, her warm breath washing over your ear. “What do you remember from today’s lesson?”

Your breathing stuttered in your chest - if it had been hard to think before, well, now it was simply impossible. All you could focus on was how Larissa loomed over you, her body pressed against yours, her lips on your ear. The heat at the apex of your thighs was becoming unbearable.

“I-I don’t know… just- your hands,” you stuttered out sheepishly - that really was all you remembered, Larissa’s fingers flexing as she spoke, how they-

“Funny,” she whispered into your ear, nibbling at your earlobe. You felt your knees begin to give out - if Larissa hadn’t been pressing you to the door, you might’ve collapsed on the spot. “I don’t remember that being a topic in today’s lesson. Perhaps it’s better we start with the basics then, hmm?”

Before you could come up with a suitable reply, you felt Larissa’s hand close around your throat, her fingers applying gentle but firm pressure, flexing against your sensitive skin. You met her gaze to see blown pupils gazing hungrily down at you, painted lips pulled into a seductive smirk.

“Think you can be a good girl for me?” Larissa’s eyes were hooded as she looked down at you, applying just a little more pressure to the sides of your neck. You nodded fervently, not trusting yourself to speak, and Larissa grinned.

She let go of your throat, ignoring your whimper of disappointment, and turned to stroll nonchalantly towards the bedroom. “Give me 2 minutes, then you can come,” she called airily as she disappeared into the hallway.

They felt like the longest two minutes of your life. When they were over, you headed after her, your spine tingling with excitement. You walked into the room to find her sitting on the edge of the bed in her bra and panties, legs parted - her heels had been kicked off, her dress discarded.

“Larissa…”

“Now, is that how you think you should address a teacher?” Larissa raised an eyebrow, lips turned into a disapproving frown.

“Uh… Principal Weems?” Your face felt hot with embarrassment, but then Larissa grinned and let out a pleased hum and you found yourself growing hot for an entirely different reason.

She spread her legs and your eyes fell to the damp spot at the center of her panties. You felt your mouth go dry and you took a few steps forward, until you were standing between her legs. She made no move to touch you - she simply watched you with an amused grin plastered on her face.

“Why don’t you show me what you know, darling? My body is at your disposal…”

You didn’t need to be told twice - you lunged forward, planting a sloppy kiss to Larissa’s lips as your hands began to trail down her body, finding the clasp of her bra and quickly undoing it. You slid the straps down her arms and dropped the garment onto the floor, focusing your attention on her now exposed chest. Your lips trailed down her skin until they found one of her breasts, and you began to litter the soft mound of flesh in little kisses and bites.

“Take my nipple into your mouth and suck,” Larissa instructed, her voice slightly breathy but still firm and commanding. You did as you were told, sucking on the small, rosy bud and feeling it harden under your tongue. “You may bite - gently.” You grazed your teeth over her nipple before biting down, feeling Larissa arch into you and hearing her sharp intake of breath.

“Good girl, now the other one.” The heat between your legs grew as Larissa commanded you, and you mirrored your actions on her other breast.

You left a trail of kisses down Larissa’s stomach - the soft swell of which was so tantalizing that, with a cautious glance up at the blonde, you sunk your teeth into her flesh, biting down gently. A strangled gasp escaped Larissa’s throat and she looked down at you in amusement.

“Getting a bit bolder now, are we?” she teased, clearly enjoying the way your cheeks went pink. “I’m not stopping you, darling.” With her permission, you spent a few more minutes loving on her stomach and hips, biting and sucking, then soothing the little marks you left with a gentle lick of your tongue.

Soon, Larissa began to squirm beneath you, giving your head a gentle push. You settled between her plush thighs then, taking a moment to give them the same reverent treatment as Larissa let out quiet sounds of pleasure.

You pressed a soft kiss to Larissa’s cunt through her underwear, before pulling the garment down her legs to reveal her dripping sex.

The scent of Larissa’s arousal hung heavy in the air, she was already so wet for you - you licked your way up her slit, taking a second to worship her folds before finally circling your tongue around her swollen clit. 

“Fuck, Riss, you taste amazing,” you groaned. You felt Larissa’s hand on the back of your head, then a sharp tug at your hair. Larissa looked down at you with a raised eyebrow.

“I-I’m sorry, Principal Weems,” you breathed out. 

“Good girl,” Larissa purred. The hand holding your hair loosened its grip and you resumed your ministrations against her clit, flicking your tongue over it in little kitten licks.

Larissa arched her back off the bed and rolled her hips against your face. Ironically, considering the lesson, you knew her body well by now - you knew she wanted you inside of her. Happy to comply, you began to tease her entrance with your fingertip, earning yourself a breathy whine from the blonde.

“Enough teasing,” she murmured, and you slipped one digit into her hole, slowly pumping it in and out, before adding a second. Her walls stretched around your fingers and she let out a soft hum. 

“Such a good student,” she teased, her voice breathy. “Quick learner.” You could almost hear the smirk in her voice, and it only served to turn you on further - you were certain your underwear was ruined.

Your fingers found a steady rhythm inside of her, curling into the soft, spongy spot that had her writhing beneath you. Using your other hand to hold Larissa’s thigh and steady yourself, you wrapped your lips around her clit and sucked, letting out a wanton groan as you felt her begin to tremble.

Larissa came undone beneath you, letting out a drawn-out moan as her hips bucked erratically against your face. You continued to fuck her through her orgasm, until she stilled beneath you and allowed herself to sink into the mattress. 

You crawled up Larissa’s body, settling on top of her and pressing a bruising kiss to her lips which she immediately deepend with a low groan as she licked her arousal off your tongue. 

“Principal Weems?” you mumbled against her lips. She hummed in response. “You said I could do anything, right?”

Larissa grabbed a fistful of your hair and gave it a sharp yank, the pain sending a shiver all the way down to your toes. Her painted lips were pulled into a devilish smirk and her eyes sparkled with curiosity. 

“And what exactly are you proposing, darling?”

You bit your lower lip, blushing as you reached for the drawer of Larissa’s beside table - her smirk widened and she rested her head back against the pillow, watching you intently. 

You pulled out the harness and dildo that rested in the drawer, your blush deepening as Larissa hummed her approval. She never took your eyes off you as you tugged the harness over your hips, tightening the straps and securing the fake cock in place.

Larissa squirmed impatiently on the bed, already spreading her legs for you. You could see how wet she was and your own clit ached at the sight. Larissa reached out for your hips and you caught her wrists, pushing forward and pinning her arms over her head.

Larissa’s pupils widened at the action, a gasp escaping her lips, her hips squirming.

You reached back into the drawer with the hand that wasn’t holding Larissa’s arms in place and pulled out a burgundy silk tie, dangling it in front of her face. She grinned up at you, giving you her best, innocent doe eyes.

“Go ahead, darling, I’m waiting,” she teased. You tied Larissa’s wrists to the headboard, making sure it was tight enough to hold her but loose enough so it wouldn’t hurt.

“That okay?”

After giving her wrists an experimental tug, Larissa nodded in confirmation. You pressed a searing kiss to her lips, before trailing kisses down her body, caressing her bare hips with your hands. You stopped at her inner thighs, taking a few moments to worship them with kitten licks and litter them in little bruises until you felt Larissa squirm desperately beneath you. The low whine that she let out was so delicious that you groaned into her pussy, and she bucked her hips up impatiently.

You placed a hand on either one of her thighs, spreading her legs open for you. She bent them at the knee and titled her hips up eagerly.

“So pretty,” you groaned as you zeroed in on her dripping cunt, taking the fake cock in your hand and teasing her hole before sliding easily inside of her. Larissa’s lips parted to let out a gasp and she squeezed her eyes shut as she got used to the sensation of being stretched out. 

When she opened her eyes again, she gave you a nod and gently bucked her hips. You began to thrust the cock in and out of her, finding a slow and steady pace at which to fuck her.

Leaning over her, you continued your rhythmic thrusting as you wrapped your mouth around her nipple, flicking your tongue over it as your other hand began to fondle the soft swell of her breast.

Each flick of your tongue and thrust of your hips drew an even filthier moan from Larissa’s lips as she rolled her hips against you. Looking up at her through your lashes as you sucked on her breast, you could see her wiggling her arms against the restraints. She gazed hungrily down at you, eyes heavy-lidded, lips parted sensually. 

“Kiss me,” Larissa demanded, and though you didn’t think she was in a position to be making demands, you couldn’t resist - you wanted to kiss her so bad, so you did. Your mouth left her nipple in favor of pressing a bruising kiss to her mouth, which she immediately deepened with a breathy sigh. 

Your tongues danced around each other, Larissa’s breathing hot and heavy. You swallowed her soft moans and low grunts as you reached deeper and deeper inside of her, tilting your hips in the way you knew would bring her the most pleasure.

Her thighs began to tremble against your hips and she arched her back off the bed, her front pressing insistently into you - her skin was warm and slick with sweat.

One orgasm turned into two, turned into three, until Larissa wrapped her legs around your hips to pull you flush against her.

“I-I c-can’t…” she murmured breathlessly. “P-please…”

“Shh, it’s okay.” You caressed her cheek lovingly before pushing yourself up and carefully sliding the dildo out of her. Before removing the harness and tossing it to the ground, you undid the tie around Larissa’s wrists, placing a gentle kiss to each wrist before allowing her to drop her hands to her sides.

You crawled up the bed next to Larissa and snuggled against her, your own breathing almost as labored as hers. 

“Was that okay, love?” you asked, pressing a kiss to her flushed cheek. You could feel her nod against you, a small smile playing upon her lips.

“Mmmh, thank you, darling,” she murmured.

You reached over her to check your phone - you still had an hour before your next class.

“Close your eyes and rest,” you whispered. “I’ll be right back.” Larissa hummed in response and you went to fetch a warm, damp washcloth and a glass of water, which Larissa drank as you cleaned up traces of her arousal from between her legs. Then you snuggled up next to her and allowed yourself to fall into a light sleep, her arm slung loosely around your waist.

The sound of your phone’s alarm 40 minutes later had you groaning and burrowing your head deeper into the crook of Larissa’s neck.

“Do we have to teach today? Can’t we just cancel the classes and stay here?” You gave Larissa your best puppy-dog eyes and biggest pout, but you knew as soon as she chuckled and kissed your forehead that your pleading wouldn’t work.

“After how much work you put in to prepare everything?” Larissa teased, and you rolled your eyes and huffed. “Tell you what.” Her voice dropped an octave and she moved her mouth to your ear - you had to clench your thighs together in response. “If you’re a good girl this afternoon, then I’ll show you what I know tonight.” You had to bite your lip to keep from moaning as Larissa’s breath washed over the shell of your ear, raising goosebumps on your neck. With that motivation, you allowed yourself to be ushered out of bed and dressed yourself for your afternoon classes - only now, the ache between your thighs was even worse than it had been that morning. How you were going to survive the rest of your classes and be a good girl, you had no idea.

x

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[nostalgebraist]

notes on ada or ardor, from the "summer of ardor 2013" reading group

This post contains my notes on the novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov, which I wrote in 2013 in connection with a small reading group for the book that I hosted for a few of my friends.

I've posted these notes online before, in several places. However, I recently discovered that all of its incarnations had disappeared, lost in the devouring maw of Web 2.0 you-are-the-product enshittification. (It was originally posted through "Facebook Notes," a feature that doesn't exist anymore; I also put it up as a series of "Goodreads Stories," a feature that also doesn't exist anymore.)

So, I'm putting them up again here, on tumblr.

I'm not under any illusions that tumblr will be around forever, and eventually I expect this copy to go the way of the others. Maybe when it does, I'll finally do the right thing and put it up on my (currently unused) personal website. But pasting it into the tumblr box is slightly easier, so here we are.

Looking back over these notes, I feel quite proud of them. I think I was underselling them in the original intro to the Goodreads edition, which (for the record) said the following:

These notes are certain [sic] inferior in comprehensiveness and erudition to, say, Brian Boyd's notes on Ada Online, or the Kyoto Reading Circle notes. In place of those qualities they mostly substitute bad jokes and webcomic references. The reasons you might, however, want to read this notes in addition to the existing sources are as follows: 1) Unlike everyone else, I try to avoid spoilers 2) I'm just a regular guy writing notes for his friends to read, which may be a good thing if you're an ordinary reader who doesn't want their face blasted off by endless scholarly discussions of minutiae

In fact, I actually went much further into "scholarly discussions of minutiae" than this would seem to suggest – with extensive citations of Boyd and others as needed – and I think I did a pretty good job of it, while not losing sight of bigger themes and stuff.

More generally, I feel like these notes really showcase my love and enthusiasm for the book.

----

The notes are divided into 11 sections, each of which covers a block of chapters we read in a particular week of the reading group. The goofy thematic titles for each of the weekly chapter blocks (e.g. "Oh, Inverted World" for the first one) are my inventions, part of my notes rather than the book itself.

I tried to avoid spoilers for later chapters when writing about earlier ones, though of course if you read the notes all the way through, you'll eventually get fully spoiled.

Except for one small added note (clearly signposted), these are given in their original 2013 form without any edits.

1. Oh, Inverted World (Part 1, Chapters 1-8)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chapters 1-8)

Let's review what we know so far. The story is apparently set on another planet (called "Demonia" or "Antiterra" -- I don't think these terms have come up yet, but I'm mentioning them for the sake of ease of reference). Its history and geography are quite similar to those of earth, although names are often different, and the dates of historical events can vary by up to 100 years. On Antiterra the northern reaches of North America have a mild, warm climate and, politically, form not an independent country (Canada) but a subsection of the U.S. called "Canady," which contains a "province" called "Estoty" which is inhabited largely by Russian-speakers in the west ("Russian Estoty") and Francophones in the east ("French Estoty"). What we call Russia on earth is called "Tartary" on Antiterra, and was settled by Tartars after the Russians were expelled to North America. (If you want some clarification on all of this, there is a very nerdy page about it called "The Geography of Antiterra" at http://www.dezimmer.net/ReAda/AntiterraGeography.htm .)

The mentally ill on Antiterra often have hallucinatory visions of our earth, which they call "Terra." This tendency began in a sort of fad in the Antiterran 1860s. A mysterious event called the "L disaster," which caused electricity to be banned, was responsible in some unspecified way for caused the Terra mania. At the time our protagonist, Van Veen, is writing, electricity has been made legal again, but in the story so far (covering the 1860s and 1880s) it is illegal and electrical devices have been replaced with hydrodynamic equivalents, such as the "dorophone" (hydrodynamic telephone). On the other hand, on the evidence of Ch. 6 at least, Antiterrans in 1884 (the date of Van and Ada's first meeting) have flying carpets and household robots. What little we see of conventional religion on Antiterra is peculiar: people say "thank Log" (short for "logos," maybe?) rather than "thank God," mention is made of "Faragod" ("the god of electricity"), and demons are seen as good rather than evil figures.

That's the setting; what about the story? The first three chapters are a convoluted and uninviting description of Van and Ada's ancestry, as well as (in Ch. 3) an account of the Terra mania and some of the differences between Antiterra and Terra. These three chapters make numerous but oblique references to the fact that Van and Ada, the two romantic leads, are not actually cousins -- as the family tree at the start of the book says -- but brother and sister: they are both actually the children of Demon and Marina, not of Demon and Aqua (Van's putative parents) and Dan and Marina (Ada's putative parents). After a description of Van's first amorous and sexual experiences in Ch. 4, we finally get some narrative traction in Ch. 5, where we start following 14-year-old Van in 1884 as he visits his relatives in Ardis Hall and meets his "cousin"/sister Ada -- who's a pedantic weirdo, but Van's, like, totally into it. That's pretty much it so far.

All of this is being described retrospectively, in the third person, by a very (implausibly?) old Van (he was born in 1870 and Ch. 4 says he "started to reconstruct his deepest past" in "the middle of the twentieth century"), with some notes in the margin by a similarly old Ada. The notes have been preserved in the text we're reading, which is curious in itself (an unedited, or partially edited, manuscript?).

One big question this book presents to the reader is whether Antiterra is real or whether it's something Van (who, in this latter conception, actually lives on our earth) has made up. When I first read the book, I thought "Antiterra is fake" was a plausible theory but by no means certain. Now, upon re-reading, it seems more and more obvious to me that Antiterra is just clearly fake -- the alternate Antiterran names are constantly shifting, for instance. So some of my notes below will talk about why I think Antiterra isn't real. (There is no critical consensus on this point, but that may just be because not enough people are paying attention.)

SOME RELEVANT TEXTS

As you probably know, Brian Boyd has been annotating Ada on his website. The annotations aren't done, and may never be -- he's up to Chapter 34 now, which is only a few chapters further than he'd gotten to when I first read the book two years ago. I will quote from these annotations often, but if you're worried about spoilers (for plot or for discoverable secrets) I don't recommend looking at them (although I used them heavily on my first read-through).

Boyd has also written a critical monograph called "Ada: The Place of Consciousness." I don't strongly recommend it, as it has the typical Boyd faults (justifies inherently implausible theories with over-complicated webs of evidence, expects first-time readers to have super-naive responses that no first-time readers actually have in practice, etc.) and in terms of the Boyd virtues (e.g. obsessive attention to detail) it has nothing to recommend it over the annotations. A better, and shorter, book is "Nabokov's Garden" by Bobbie Ann Mason (published -- really -- by Ardis Press in Ann Arbor), which gets closer to the heart of what Nabokov is doing than Boyd ever seems to.

There is also a set of annotations that Nabokov prepared himself to aid translators, called "Notes to Ada, by Vivian Darkbloom." Your copy may include them at the back. These are pretty sparse and pedestrian, but they are worth mentioning from time to time.

Ada makes a whole bunch of references to books and to visual art. According to Boyd and Mason, some of the more important textual reference points are:

Pushkin (Eugene Onegin) Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Childhood/Boyhood/Youth) Chateaubriand (Atala/Rene)

Of these I have only read Anna Karenina.

NOTES

A note on pronunciation: "Ada," as Chapter 5 indicates, is pronounced "ahh-dahh," so that it sounds like "ardor" spoken in a non-rhotic accent. "Van" has the same type of "a" sound, since it is an abbreviation of "Ivan." "Veen" is, I think, pronounced like "vain," both for resonance with the word "vain" and because that's how it's pronounced in the Dutch surname "van Veen," which Van's name is supposed to remind us of. I've heard some people pronounce it like the first syllable of "Venus," though, and "Venus" is another intended resonance of the name.

" 'All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,' says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor 3.05 Ltd., 1880)." (1) -- this inversion of the opening sentence of Anna Karenina (which Nabokov, incidentally, insisted should be called Anna Karenin in English) is many things. It's Nabokov making fun of bad translations. It is our narrator, Van Veen, declaring that his family, although sui generis (so to speak), is a happy one. It is an indication that we are entering a mirrored world in which some things may be different from what we're used to -- indeed, may take precisely the opposite form. It's an indication that this book will be (among other things) a parody of 19th century novels. Above all, it is a bizarre opening line that sets the tone for this bizarre book.

"Demon's twofold hobby was collecting old masters and young mistresses. He also liked middle-aged puns." (4) -- now that's my kind of 19th-century libertine! (Note, incidentally, that since Antiterra is also known as Demonia, Demon is effectively named after the earth [or the version of the earth he lives on], which is a good match for names like Marina and Aqua.)

" 'I deduce,' said the boy, 'three main facts . . . " (8) -- this first (textually, not chronologically) conversation between Van and Ada is wonderfully and implausibly dense. The upshot here is that the two have discovered the secret of Van's birth: Marina substituted her baby, whom Demon fathered, for Aqua's dead son, and the mentally impaired Aqua believed that the baby really was her child. This makes Van the son of Marina and Demon (rather than Aqua and Demon), and since the pair already knows that Ada's true father is Demon rather than Dan, this means they are both children of Marina and Demon -- full siblings. (This contradicts the family tree printed at the beginning, and -- despite numerous hints in the coming pages -- was actually missed by some early reviewers of the novel, who went through the whole thing believing that Van and Ada were cousins. Martin Amis, writing in 2009, thinks they are "half-siblings." My nerdrage knows no bounds.)

"by the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother" (8) -- here's Boyd with the genealogy of this phrase: "Van says 'the sea, his dark-blue great-grandmother' in allusion to the opening chapter of another famous novel, Ulysses (pub. 1922), by James Joyce (1882-1941). In the opening chapter Buck Mulligan, looking seaward, and like Van and Ada also showing off in the first conversation in the novel, exclaims: 'Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton' ([Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986], 4; 1.77-78). 'Algy' here is Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909): 'I will go back to the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea' ('The Triumph of Time,' pub. 1866, ll. 257-58). 'Epi oinopa ponton' means 'over the wine-dark sea,' a Homeric formula recurring throughout the Odyssey. Notice that Nabokov's 'dark-blue great-grandmother' wittily combines the 'grey' color term in Joyce's recycling of Swinburne's phrase and the 'great sweet mother' in Swinburne, with the 'great' again wittily given an improbable new value in 'great-grandmother.' "

Chapter 2 -- according to Boyd, the bad play Marina acts in here is a parody of bad translations/adaptations of Eugene Onegin. Unlike some of you, I haven't read Eugene Onegin, so the jokes are lost on me.

"the Baron, a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai, had gone over to Japan forever" (14) -- for some reason I can't stop laughing over the weird, unexpected use of the word "Samurai" here. (It seems ripe for being turned into some sort of surrealist compliment/insult, e.g. "Rob, you are a physical wreck and a spiritual Samurai!")

"Van, I trust your taste and your talent but are we quite sure we should keep reverting so zestfully to that wicked world which after all may have existed only oneirologically, Van? marginal jotting in Ada's 1965 hand; crossed out lightly in her latest wavering one." (15) -- this is the first of what I think of as "moments of instability," moments when the book suggests that there is some crucial secret of its nature that we are not privy to. What is it that "may have existed only oneirologically"? Van and Ada's highly detailed ideas about what their parents' courtship was like? Antiterra as a whole? (If the latter, this would explain why Ada later crossed out the comment, since Chapter 3 makes it clear that Van is determined to stick with the Antiterra idea.) "Reverting" suggests regression (towards something worse, more immature) as well as turning something over (from the root "vert") as images are turned over by a mirror.

"The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated)" (17) -- strange that he would have to point the latter out in a world in which the L disaster is "well-known historically." "L" can stand for "electricity" (the L disaster has caused electricity to be banned) -- also "Ladore"? (Or Lenin. Or other, more spoilery options.)

"1869 (by no means a mirabilic year)" (19) -- Boyd's annotation for this reads as follows: "a pun on annus mirabilis (Latin, 'wonderful year,' applied especially to 1666, the year of London's Great Fire, in John Dryden's 'Annus Mirabilis,' 1667); on aqua mirabilis, sometimes shortened simply to mirabilis, 'a distilled cordial made of spirits, sage, betony, balm and other aromatic ingredients' (W2), since Aqua is about to be introduced; and as Proffer suggests on Russian mir, 'peace,' and Latin bellum, 'war,' since 1869 was the year Tolstoy's War and Peace was completed." Now that's a pun!

"Marina, with perverse vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon's senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of 'incestuous' (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French /plaisir/, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (/une chair/) that was both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a geminate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations." (19) -- And that is a sentence!

"Demon Veen married Aqua Durmanov -- out of spite and pity, a not unusual blend." (19) -- Karkat would be proud!

"Abraham Milton" on p. 18 becomes "Milton Abraham" on p. 21. Curiouser and curiouser.

"this our sufficient world. . . . Sufficient for your purpose, Van, entendons-nous. (Note in the margin.)" (21) -- second moment of instability. What is Van's "purpose"? This one is easier to make sense of under an "Antiterra isn't real" theory, since in that case Antiterra is sufficient for Van's purposes (i.e. for the reasons that led him to invent it), but not, e.g., for the purposes of other people whose real actions might be misrepresented there. If Antiterra is real, then Ada is either reminding Van of the general fact that some people are less satisfied with the world than he is, or reminding him in particular of people who hope their souls will transmigrate to Terra after death.

With its mystical manias and its college students dropping out to join 'fashionable' social causes, the Antiterran 1860s seem to imitate the Terran 1960s, in which Nabokov was writing.

Strange to have "Anna Karenin, a novel" (25), with that helpful explanatory clause, when on the first page the same novel (with a less accurate name) was "famous." "Manipulate each other" sounds more sexual than what actually happens in A.K., fitting for Ada's combination of 19th century stylings and sexual frankness.

" ' . . . it would have been so much more plausible, esthetically, ecstatically, Estotially speaking -- if she were really my mother.' " (30) -- an enigmatic outburst. Boyd's annotation for "Estotially" says "given the incest laws in Estoty?"

"such details of his infancy as really mattered (for the special purpose the reconstruction pursued)" (31) -- third moment of instability. (What is this "special purpose"? Is is the same as "your purpose" on p. 21?)

"He knew she was nothing but a fubsy pig-pink whorelet and would elbow her face away when she attempted to kiss him after he had finished" (33) -- this will turn out to be pretty representative of how Van sees women.

Chapters 5 and 6 -- we are now past the abstruse genealogical/scene-setting chapters, and, suddenly and somewhat incongruously, we're dropped into a Wes Anderson movie or something. Everything is visually lush and sort of cutesy. Something like this tone will persist, with various interruptions, for quite a while, but don't be fooled into thinking this is all the book has to offer.

"Ardelia" (36) -- Van's misremembering of "Adelaida" (Ada).

"the tiny, tremulous poodlet" (37) -- I present this phrase without comment.

" 'I used to love history,' said Marina. 'I loved to identify myself with famous women. There's a ladybird on your plate, Van. Especially with famous beauties -- Lincoln's second wife or Queen Josephine.' " (38) -- that's Marina for you. Also we can now add "Lincoln" to the two variants of "Abraham Milton."

" . . . jikkers were banned by the airpatrol; but four years later Van who loved that sport bribed a local mechanic to clean the thing, reload its hawking-tubes, and generally bring it back into magic order . . . " (44) -- I'm 99% sure the jikkers with their "hawking-tubes" were the inspiration for the flying carpets called "Hawking mats" that appear in the Hyperion series by science fiction writer Dan Simmons, which I coincidentally happened to be reading concurrently with Ada in summer 2011. (Simmons is a Nabokov fan and uses the name "Ardis" in the series as well. Of course when he uses "Hawking" it's also a reference to Stephen Hawking.)

"Owing to a mixture of overlapping styles and tiles (not easily explainable in non-technical terms to non-roof-lovers)" (45) -- "non-roof-lovers" is certainly not a category that enters my mind very often.

"le Docteur Chronique, I mean Crolique" (49) -- [insert weed joke here]

"Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago" (53) -- Vivian Darkbloom explains: "play on 'Zhivago' ('zhiv' in Russian means alive and 'mertv' dead)."

"Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like it? He did." (54) -- Apparently Finnegans Wake existed in 1884 on Antiterra. Boyd says: "The famous lyrical prose passage involving two washerwomen by the Liffey, at the end of the 'Anna Livia Plurabelle' chapter (I.viii) of Finnegans Wake (1938) -- a passage Joyce recorded in his own voice -- includes the refrain 'Tell me,' which in its last transformation becomes 'Tell me, tell me, tell me elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone.' (216.03-04). Though a great admirer of Ulysses, Nabokov thought Finnegans Wake 'a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room. . . . Finnegans Wake’s façade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity.' (Strong Opinions 71)"

"The retractile head and diabolical anal appendages of the garish monster that produces the modest Puss Moth" (55) -- "Diabolical Anal Appendages" is a great band name.

"Les Malheurs de Swann" (55) -- Vivian Darkbloom: "cross between Les malheurs de Sophie by Mme de Ségur (née Countess Rostopchin) and Proust’s Un amour de Swann."

2. Youth in Revolt (Part 1, Chapters 9-16)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 9-16)

So, starting around Ch. 10 or so, we find ourselves REALLY CLEARLY situated inside the mind of a teenage boy. Everything is openly sexualized, even the food ("enormous purple pink plums, one with a wet yellow burst-split" [62] -- eww). Nabokov usually isn't this overt about this kind of stuff (if he includes it at all), and it was pretty startling to me the first time I read this book.

Back then these chapters startled me in a number of ways, really -- most of them having to do with the way they realistically, perhaps too realistically, take us into the world of adolescents with all their horniness and haughtiness. Van and Ada, who were likable enough in the previous section, begin to grate in this one. Take, for instance, the way their sense of superiority to Mlle Larivière infects not only their own dialogue but also the narration:

". . . the story lacked 'realism' within its own terms . . . That was the fatal flaw in the Larivière pathos-piece, but at the time young Van and younger Ada could not quite grope for that point although they felt instinctively the falsity of the whole affair." (87)

If we take this as an editorial comment from Nabokov himself (rather than just from old Van), it seems pretty self-indulgent: he has created a character who is an incompetent writer, has attack her writing in the voices of his other characters, and now attacks her in the narration itself -- pointing out flaws that he created to begin with! What's even worse is how close Van, and especially Ada, are to Nabokov in various ways -- e.g. Ada's interest in botany and entomology and her distaste for bad translations -- which makes this close to self-congratulatory self-insert 19th-century-novel fanfiction.

Is this interpretation false? Well, I think so, but for reasons that only become clear later on. For the moment, I'll just say that if your reaction to these chapters is "get off my lawn, you damn kids," your reaction is valid, and probably what Nabokov intended. (I mean, not to say their romance doesn't have some appeal; of course it does.)

NOTES

"punctuating Ada’s discourse with little ejaculations" (62) -- see what I mean about sexualizing everything?

" 'It was sort of long, long. I mean (interrupting herself)… like a tentacle… no, let me see' " (62) -- I rest my case.

Chapter 12 is beautiful and odd in its own unique way.

"among the instruments in the horsecart" (72) -- "horsecart" is an anagram for "orchestra." Darkbloom: "horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades ('symbols in an orchal orchestra')."

"Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: 'real things' which were unfrequent and priceless, simply 'things' which formed the routine stuff of life; and 'ghost things,' also called 'fogs,' such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a 'tower,' or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a 'bridge.' 'Real towers' and 'real bridges' were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral 'thing' might look or even actually become 'real' or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid 'fog.' When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with 'ruined towers' and 'broken bridges.' " (74) -- I like this passage, and this system. I've forgotten a lot of stuff from this book but this has always stuck in my mind.

"The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing. 'We shall try to eat one later,' she observed . . . " (75) -- Ada, you are so WEIRD.

" . . . the child was permitted to wear her lolita . . . a rather long, but very airy and ample, black skirt" (77) -- how Japanese of her. Seriously, though, this is one of the many throwaway references to Lolita in Nabokov's later work, which have always gotten on my nerves for some reason. I guess it's poking fun at the public's perception of him as primarily "the guy who wrote Lolita," but it also seems like more fuel for that very perception? I dunno.

" . . . thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy of that name in Osberg’s novel" (77) -- Osberg is an anagram of Borges, to whom Nabokov has often been compared.

"with red poppies or peonies, 'deficient in botanical reality,' as she grandly expressed it, not yet knowing that reality and natural science are synonymous in the terms of this, and only this, dream. (Nor did you, wise Van. Her note.)" (77) -- another moment of instability at which I can only smile and nod. No clue what this means.

"[thus in the MS. Ed.]" (79) -- so the manuscript has been edited, but in a hands-off way, preserving errors and marginal notes rather than removing them or smoothing them out.

"'But, my poor Mathilde, the necklace was false: it cost only five hundred francs!' " (83) -- this story is the Antiterran equivalent of Maupassant's La Parure (thanks, Boyd). I do wonder if there's any intended parallel here to Van being substituted for Aqua's child.

"Being unfamiliar with the itinerary of sun and shade in the clearing, he had left his bicycle to endure the blazing beams for at least three hours." (86) -- even the most trivial details in this book are just so entertainingly described.

Chapter 15 -- I really like the way this chapter seems to be a parody of "loss of innocence" scenes, complete with the heavy-handed Tree of Knowledge symbolism. Since it rings true that Van and Ada might retrospectively view their lives in parodic terms, the scene also works "normally," as characterization, even while it also works as a parody.

"to snatch, as they say, a first shy kiss" (95) -- the innuendo pile doesn't stop from getting taller, if you believe Boyd: "Pun. Cf. Boyd 1985/2001: 243: 'seems to allude to a stock expression -- but the actual idiom is "steal a kiss." Why then that "as they say" just after snatch? Because, of course, there is one colloquial use of "snatch" ': vulva." (On the other hand, I remember the phrase "snatch a kiss" appearing in the romance-novelly chapter of Ulysses, so unless that was the same joke, it may just be an antiquated idiom . . . )

"with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping" (98) -- hard to read even a few words of this book without encountering some sort of mischief. "Ardilla" means squirrel in Spanish, FYI.

3. And I'll Bury My Soul in a Scrapbook (Part 1, Chapters 17-24)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 17-24)

Van and Ada's romance begins in earnest with an appropriately pyrotechnic backdrop; DIY sex ed is facilitated by the vast Ardis library; poems are transmogrified and crossbred; Lucette gets in the way; the style is sometimes gorgeous and sometimes playful or jokey to the point of tedium. The attic scene at the end of Ch. 1 fits somewhere in here, chronologically speaking. Meanwhile, the density of references has gone up precipitously, so I've written a lot more notes, most of which are quoted or cribbed from Boyd. There is the feeling of a steady rise in difficulty after the easy early Ardis chapters, like a musical piece that slowly builds in complexity.

If you're up to date, can you leave a comment saying whether you like the book so far? Just curious. I know this book is polarizing, and I don't want to feel like I'm leading you down a very long blind alley.

NOTES

Compared the leering and arch chapters directly preceding it, Chapter 17 is rather lovely. The tone in much of Part 1 seems to waver between romantic and satiric, with one of the two dominating the other in each chapter (speaking roughly).

"Their lips were absurdly similar in style, tint and tissue. Van's upper one resembled in shape a long-winged sea bird coming directly at you, while the nether lip, fat and sullen, gave a touch of brutality to his usual expression. Nothing of that brutality existed in the case of Ada's lips, but the bow shape of the upper one and the largeness of the lower one with its disdainful prominence and opaque pink repeated Van's mouth in a feminine key." (102) -- just felt like noting this down because it's an example of this book's excellent descriptions of sensory detail. Note the motif of Van's "brutality" (Ada's reaction to Van's hand-walking performance in Ch. 13: "I felt there was something dreadful, brutal, dark, and, yes, dreadful, about the whole thing" [86]).

"Nose, cheek, chin -- all possessed such a softness of outline (associated retrospectively with keepsakes, and picture hats, and frightfully expensive little courtesans in Wicklow)" (103) -- unsubtle foreshadowing: apparently Van will be soliciting courtesans later on.

"pascaltrezza" (103) -- Darkbloom: "pascaltrezza: in this pun, which combines Pascal with scaltrezza (Ital., 'sharp wit') and treza (a Provençal word for 'tressed stalks'), the French 'pas' negates the 'pensant' of the ‘roseau’ in his famous phrase 'man is a thinking reed.' " Sick pun, bro!

"Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive." (103) -- okay, I'm going to have to stop noting down every cool or cute line in this chapter or else I'll just be noting down the whole thing. Boyd quibbles: "Rembrandt . . . is generally much less festive than such compatriots and contemporaries as Franz Hals (c.1581-1665) and Jan Steen (1625/6-1679). Van may particularly have in mind the decidedly festive 'Self-portrait with Saskia' . . . "

"What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written word 'deified'?" (104) -- my quote moratorium has lasted less than a page, it seems.

" . . . the most tragic and almost fatal point of my life . . . How I used to seek, with what tenacious anguish, traces and tokens of my unforgettable love in all the brothels of the world!" (104) -- this chapter seems intent on briefing us about the shape of the overall plot. Note that a moment ago we got a reminder that Lucette died young ("at eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-five, finis" [104]), though technically that could be deduced from the family tree at the beginning.

" 'I am sentimental,' she said. 'I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand.' " (105) -- Boyd: "Damozel is an archaic variant of 'damsel,' revived by Sir Walter Scott and other romantics after him 'to express a more stately notion than is now conveyed by damsel' (OED). Eglantine, especially [sic? -Rob] the sweetbriar (Rosa eglantera). Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599) in The Faerie Queene (1590-96) uses both words toward the end of Book III, Canto VI (The Garden of Adonis), 'eglantine' in stanza 44, 'damozel' in stanza 54."

"a cad" (105) -- presumably Demon.

"after Mlle Larivière had threatened to smear poor Ada's fingertips with French mustard and tie green, yellow, orange, red, pink riding hoods of wool around them" (106) -- Boyd cites Jay Alan Edelnant's Ph.D. thesis, which notes that "this sequence implies 'green thumb' and 'pinkie.' ".

"born between Paris and Tagne (as he'd better, said Ada, who liked crossing orchids)." (106) -- Boyd notes that "Tagne" is not a real place and "seems a back formation from 'montagne' in the poem (106.25), as if it were 'mon Tagne,' 'my Tagne.' " The poem that follows is a hybrid ("crossing orchids") between the most famous poems of Baudelaire and (the actual) Chateaubriand (the latter poem will show up again in Ch. 22, where V&A will play with various phrases of the form "mon [X]"). Darkbloom translates it as "my child, my sister, think of the thickness of the big oak at Tagne, think of the mountain, think of the tenderness -- "

"Lucette’s and Lucile’s" (106) -- "Lucille, incidentally, was the true name of Chateaubriand’s sister, with whom he was in love" (Vera Nabokov).

" . . . and briefly attaining a drugged beatitude into which, as into a vacuum, the ferocity of the itch would rush with renewed strength." (107) -- a good description of this familiar experience.

"Nowadays it seems to be getting extinct, what with the cooler climate" (108) -- apparently the Antiterran climate has been growing closer to the Terran one?

"Suddenly Van heard her lovely dark voice on the staircase saying in an upward direction, 'Je l’ai vu dans une des corbeilles de la bibliothèque' -- presumably in reference to some geranium or violet or slipper orchid." (125) -- Ada's utterance, "I saw it in one of the wastepaper-baskets of the library," is actually (presumably) a response to Blanche asking about the location of her slipper, which she lost at the start of Ch. 19 ("Yes, she rushed down the corridor and lost a miniver-trimmed slipper on the grand staircase." [114]).

"She wore -- though not in collusion with him" (126) -- Boyd's annotation reads: "Why might we have thought that Ada had donned her black shorts and white jersey in collusion with Van?" I dunno, man.

From Boyd's Forenote to Ch. 21: "The prohibition against knowing about sex matches the Edenic prohibition against tasting of the Tree of Knowledge, and the theme of Ardis as Garden of Eden somehow resounds even amid the hush of the library. Just as the solitary couple in the left panel of Bosch’s Garden of Delights gives way to the throngs of sensualists, fructivores and sexual acrobats in the triptych’s central panel, in an endless slow merry-go-round of desire, so Van and Ada returning now as lovers to the library sample sex as something endlessly repeated through time: in evolutionary terms, from Serromyia flies and the lowliest farm animals to geishas and Casanovas; in cultural terms, from Oriental erotica, Shastras and Nefzawis, to litterateurs and sexologists."

"May 1, 1884 . . . 14,841 items" (130) -- I quote Boyd's annotation here because it's the kind of hyper-minute and hyper-trivial analysis only Boyd, for better or for worse, can provide: "The echo of the date ('1, 1884') in the number of items in the library (which would have been even closer had Nabokov chosen April 1, 1884: 1-4-1884: why did he choose 'Mayday' rather than April Fool’s Day?; and see 133.01 and n.) and the palindromic quality of '14841' (which also happens to be the sum of the squares of 120 and 21, the latter the number of the chapter -- is this significant, in this self-referential section? -- and the former a near palindrome of it, with 'nothing' added -- was that intended?) reflect Nabokov’s abilities as mathematical prodigy in his infant years, and his preoccupation with pattern in both nature (butterfly wing-markings, for instance) and art (versification, for instance)."

"A bawdy critic in a collection of articles which she now could gleefully consult (Les muses s'amusent)" (133) -- Nabokov's invention, title means "The Muses Have Fun." (Boyd)

"Ivan Ivanov" (134) -- sounds like a reference to Van, but Boyd notes also: " 'Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov' is the archetypal Russian; see for instance Bernard Guilbert Guerney’s translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls (but not in Gogol himself), ch. 11: 'why, on several occasions caricatures had actually been put out depicting Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov talking with John Bull' (1942; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966, 252.)"

"Kapuskan patois" (136) -- Boyd: "Kapuskan patois: Which, judging by the sample, seems to consists of a mix of French, American and Spanish, the European languages (except for Portuguese) of Earth’s Americas. Kapuskasing is a town in northern Ontario (49.25N, 82.26W), in an area of Ontario where French and English are both widely spoken." As for the "Kapuskan" quote itself: "This comically transparent macaronic passage yields: 'The only sure method of deceiving nature is for a strong-guy to continue-continue-continue until the pleasure brims; and then, at the last moment, to switch to the other groove; but because an ardent or a heavy woman cannot turn over quick enough, the transition is helped by the position of torovago.' "

"Heinrich Müller" (136) -- Darkbloom: "author of Poxus, etc." Of course this is Henry Miller, author (on Terra many decades later) of Sexus, etc. (For a good time, check out Gore Vidal's review of Sexus.)

"My sister . . . " (138) -- for the song by Chateaubriand on which this is based (which was crossbred with Baudelaire back in Ch. 17), see here. (If you want to avoid a quotation from a later chapter of Ada, stop reading at the sentence beginning "The poem, with score and tune . . . ")

"Ma soeur, te souvient-il encore / Du château que baignait la Dore?" (138) -- straight from the Chateaubriand: "My sister, do you still remember / The castle bathed by the Dore?"

"Sestra moya, tï pomnish' goru / I dub vïsokiy, i Ladoru?" (138) -- Darkbloom's trans.: "my sister, do you remember the mountain, and the tall oak, and the Ladore?"

"Oh! qui me rendra mon Aline / Et le grand chêne et ma colline?" (138) -- Darkbloom's trans.: "oh who will give me back my Aline, and the big oak, and my hill?" Slight alteration of the final sestet of the Chateaubriand: "mountain" has been changed to "hill" and "Helene" has become "Aline," the name of Chateaubriand's elder brother's wife (significance?). Darkbloom on the original: "The final (fifth) sestet begins with 'Oh! qui me rendra mon Hélène, Et ma montagne et le grand chêne' -- one of the leitmotivs of the present novel."

"Oh! qui me rendra, mon Adèle / Et ma montagne et l'hirondelle?" (138) -- now the name is "Adele" (now the addressee rather than the object) and the "great oak" is the "swallow." Adele brings "Adelaida" (Ada's real name) to mind just as "Lucile" below does for Lucette/Lucinda.

"Oh! qui me rendra ma Lucile, / La Dore et l'hirondelle agile?" (139) -- now it's "the Dore" and "the agile swallow." Lucile is the real name of Chateaubriand's sister. "Agile swallow" comes from an utterance of Mlle Lariviere's ("And see that agile swallow!" [87]), as do some other bits here.

"Oh, who will render in our tongue" (139) -- pun on earlier "rendra" ("give back").

"say 'chort' (devil) . . . which he had never heard her do before" (139) -- Van's forgetting that he had her say "chort" on p. 96. Speaking of devils, note that "Ada" means "of hell" (i.e. it's the genitive of "hell") in Russian.

"To the average physiologist, the energy of those two youngsters might have seemed abnormal" (139) -- part of a motif about Van and Ada's exceptional nature; cf. the earlier mention of the "demon blood" (20) they inherited from their father (which brings us back, thematically, to hell).

"yclept" (141) -- "Meaning 'called,' 'named,' this word, elsewhere obsolete, survived as an allowable archaism in poetry." (Boyd)

" 'I kept for years -- it must be in my Ardis nursery -- the anthology you once gave me; and the little poem you wanted me to learn by heart is still word-perfect in a safe place of my jumbled mind, with the packers trampling on my things, and upsetting crates, and voices calling: time to go, time to go. Find it in Brown and praise me again for my eight-year-old intelligence as you and happy Ada did that distant day, that day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty little bottle. . . . ' " (146) -- well, that's heartbreaking. Note that Van, typically (as we shall see), does not comment on the pathos of the situation.

"Here, said the guide . . . " (146): Nabokov wrote, in third person, to Bobbie Ann Mason: "The poem Peter and Margaret is of course Nabokov’s own composition. Not a single reader (as far as he knows) has understood that it is a stylized glimpse of a mysterious person visiting the place, open to tourists, where in legendary times ('legendary' in Antiterra terms) a certain Peter T. had his last interview with the Queen’s sister. Although he accuses the old guide of being a 'ghost,' it is he, in the reversal of time, who is a ghostly tourist, the ghost of Peter T. himself. It is a very beautiful little poem, it should send a tingle down the spine of the reader." For a full report on the reference here and the way this poem by the fictional "Robert Brown" emulates Tennyson and Browning, see here.

"But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years -- problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space -- and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die" (153) -- death has poked its head into the frame a number of times in these chapters ("the most tragic and almost fatal point of my life" [104], "a fatidic shiver" [146], " their . . . in many ways fatal romance" [148]), and it does so again in this remarkable sentence. Et in Arcadia ego?

"just finished reading her new story" (154) -- this one is based on Maupassant's "La Petite Roque" (AKA "Little Louise Roque"). There's a summary here.

4. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Part 1, Chapters 25-34)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 25-34)

In which Van learns you can never really recapture your childhood.

The story now shifts into a new phase: where Van's preoccupying monomania used to be his attraction to Ada, it is now his jealousy of anyone who might, conceivably, have designs on her. There is a newly neurotic tone to many of these chapters, and Van's characteristic allusiveness starts to seem defensive rather than expressive or simply playful. Meanwhile, Lucette herself has become infatuated with Van. (What is it with this family?)

NOTES

"kitchen Kim with his camera" (156) -- pay close attention to Kim and his camera.

"Tel un lis sauvage confiant au désert" (157) -- "Thus a wild lily entrusting the wilderness" (Darkbloom). A quote from Les Trois Règnes de la Nature by Abbé Jacques Delille (in context: "Thus a wild lily / Entrusting to the wilderness the perfume it exhales, / Hides its virginal beauty from the indiscreet winds"). Delille seems to have been one of the many, many authors on Nabokov's shit list.

" . . . and this attire was hardly convenient for making klv zdB AoyvBno wkh gwzxm dqg kzwAAqvo a gwttp vq wjfhm Ada in a natural bower of aspens; xliC mujzikml, after which she said: . . ." (157) -- just when you thought this book couldn't get any weirder, it just starts throwing glitchy gibberish at you with no warning whatsoever. Of course, all is explained in the next chapter, but I really like the audacity of it. (The joke here is that if you actually decode the text, it's completely tame, at least on a surface level: "making his way through the brush and crossing a brook to reach Ada in a natural bower of aspens; they embraced.")

"the letter scene in Tschaikow’s opera Onegin and Olga" (158) -- Boyd: "Nabokov mocks here the inaccuracies of theatrical adaptations of literary texts, including the Chaikovsky adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (see 10.11-12.20 and nn. and 511.34: 'the preposterous libretto'). The letter scene, itself specifically parodied at 11.02-20 (and nn.), of course focuses on Tatiana as letter-writer. A version that had misconstrued Pushkin’s story enough to have her sister Olga share the title with Onegin might even omit Tatiana altogether. In Pt. 1 Ch. 2 the show in which Marina plays the letter-writing role seems to be called Eugene and Lara (13.22), which at least preserves as well as distorts some of Tatiana’s surname (Larina); but by now, the disintegration has become even more complete, as the other Larina girl takes over the title role."

"I don't know. I adore you. I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go." (158) -- "adore"/"Ladore" here resonates nicely with the unspoken (but, in this book, always present) "ardor."

"Stumbling on melons, fiercely beheading the tall arrogant fennels with his riding crop" (159) -- Darkbloom: "allusions to passages in Marvell’s 'Garden' and Rimbaud’s 'Mémoire.'" (From Marvell's Garden: "Stumbling on melons, as I pass, / Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.") [TV narrator voice] "Previously on Ada or Ardor": Rimbaud's poem was referenced a number of times in Van and Ada's esoteric lunch-table conversation in Ch. 10.

In Chapter 27 we begin to get a sense of Van's conventionally masculine double standard about infidelity.

"Villa Armina: Marina never realized it was an anagram of the sea, not of her." (163) -- Ouch!

"garbotosh" (165) -- reference to a famous poster for the film Anna Christie, which pictures Greta Garbo wearing a macintosh. As it happens, all of the physical characteristics listed later in this passage are consistent with the idea that Cordula is supposed to look like Garbo. Garbo was rumored to have had affairs with women. (She also -- perhaps relevantly? -- played the title character in the 1935 adaptation of Anna Karenina.)

"ambivert" (165) -- apparently this means "a type of person intermediate between the introvert and the extrovert," though of course it sounds as though it means "bisexual."

"by his amour-propre, not by their sale amour" (168) -- "amour-propre" can mean either "self-love" or "clean love"; the former appears to be the actual meaning here, but the latter allows the phrase to appear to contrast more directly with "sale amour" ("dirty love"). Darkbloom: "pun borrowed from Tolstoy's 'Resurrection.'"

"On the contrary: a private picture of their fondling each other kept pricking him with perverse gratification." (168) -- another "yep, Van sure is a teenage boy" moment. (It wasn't until I copied this quote down here that I noticed the retrospectively obvious innuendo in "pricking." Maybe it's best to assume that every word of this book is some sort of innuendo until proven otherwise . . . )

"Adula" (168) -- resonates of course with "adulation."

"the entire treatment of the Marcel and Albertine affair" (169) -- Van refers to the theory that the character Albertine in In Search of Lost Time is really a gender-swapped male, i.e., that her affair with Marcel is actually a veiled depiction of a male homosexual affair.

"(On fait son grand Joyce after doing one's petit Proust. In Ada's lovely hand.)" -- the previous sentence links up to Joyce's Ulysses in several difficult-to-catch ways, described by Boyd here. Note that Van's monologue about Proust was itself in the style of Proustian dialogue.

"He could solve an Euler-type problem" (171) -- an insignificant detail, but as a math guy I'm of course curious what exactly is meant by this phrase. There are many problems associated with Euler, who was one of the most prolific mathematicians ever. In the French translation of Ada this becomes "a problem in Euler integrals." Euler integrals are certain special mathematical functions, which doesn't nail down what the problems in question are, but gives us a general idea of what sort of knowledge is involved -- calculus, probably. (Van is 10!)

"I have often wondered why the Russian for it" (175) -- by "it" he means "cheating."

"Van worked under Tyomkin, at the Chose famous clinic, on an ambitious dissertation he never completed, 'Terra: Eremitic Reality or Collective Dream?' " (182) -- the nature of the Terra pathology, along with the nature of time and space, will be one of Van's major interests as an adult.

"a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time" (185) -- "ardis" means "point of an arrow" in Greek, so this is a modification of the conventional phrase "the arrow of time."

"Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal, the social-scene commentators, the moralists, the idea-mongers and so forth." (185) -- yep, we're definitely reading a Nabokov book here.

"Van on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life -- acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children." (185) -- this makes explicit what might already have been clear: the connection between Van's interest in card tricks, acrobatic feats, etc. and his penchant for playing tricks with words.

"and (I have a note here, for the ghost of a novel) 'the low cut of her black dress allowed the establishment of a sharp contrast between the familiar mat whiteness of her skin and the brutal black horsetail of her new hair-do.'" (188) -- a vertical A-B-A (or, equivalently, A-D-A) pattern. The novel in question here is presumably Ada itself, which apparently means that this bit is some earlier note or thought that has been incorporated into the text. Note that the dramatic arc of Ada follows something like an A-D-A pattern, and that the title itself contains more than one such pattern (the word "Ada" is one, and the fact that "Ada" sounds like "Ardor" makes the phrase "Ada or Ardor" another).

"'My teacher,' she said, 'at the Drama School thinks I'm better in farces than in tragedy. If they only knew!'" (191) -- a self-conscious nod to the tension between comedy and drama in this novel?

"her only true love, the head of the arrow" (192) -- another ardis.

"I'll have them reassembled in Ladore when I motor there one of these days." (193-4) -- and here's another attempt to triumph over the ardis of time, this one much closer to the sort of examples found in introductory physics textbooks. The collecting of the necklace pieces seems like a pretty transparent metaphor for the lovers' attempt in this scene to recapture what they had in 1884.

Note that Ada has become less interested in biology (nature) and more interested in acting (artifice). Bobbie Ann Mason sees this as an effect of the corrupting influence of her "unnatural" affair with Van.

"Her director, G.A. Vronsky" (197) -- Vronsky is Anna's lover in Anna Karenina. His name is combined here with "the 'common Russian-Jewish name' Gavronsky" (Boyd citing Alfred Appel). Cf. Marina's lover "Baron d’Onsky" (13).

"what begins with a 'de' and rhymes more or less with a Silesian river ant" (199) -- "Since the Oder is the main river of Silesia, a historical region of eastern Europe now mostly in Poland although with small portions in Germany and the Czech Republic, the riddle spells the hint: 'deodorant.'" (Boyd).

"She smelled of damp cotton, axillary tufts, and nenuphars, like mad Ophelia." (199) -- cool sentence. Nenuphars are water lilies.

"The indecent 'telegraph'" (201) -- the banning of electricity has had amusing consequences for Antiterran profanity.

"(reversing the action of Dr. Ero, pursued by the Invisible Albino in one of the greatest novels of English literature)" (203) -- Darkbloom: "thus the h-dropping policeman in Wells’s Invisible Man defined the latter’s treacherous friend." Could additionally be a reference to Ellison's Invisible Man. (In an interview, Nabokov discusses the notion of meeting literary figures in heaven: "It would be fun to hear Shakespeare roar with ribald laughter on being told what Freud (roasting in the other place) made of his plays. It would satisfy one's sense of justice to see H. G. Wells invited to more parties under the cypresses than slightly bogus Conrad.")

"the sunglasses of much-sung lasses" (203) -- that's a pretty good one.

"two black and one golden-red head" (204) -- a possible A-D-A, although it seems more likely that Van is in the middle (in which case it's an A-D-A by gender, I guess).

5. Father Lucifer (Part 1, Chapters 35-38)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 35-38)

The Ardis of 1888 continues to be awkward. Scrabble is played. Demon stops by and wants to ask whether Van and Ada are involved, but never manages to.

To be honest, with the exception of the Scrabble scene, I'm not that fond of these chapters -- the plot has been lagging lately and the reader could be forgiven for wondering whether any of this is going anywhere or whether the rest of the book will be comprised of minor, unpleasant Veen family interactions described at great length. Mark my words, though: the next section (the rest of Part 1) is utter gold, and is what convinced me I loved the book the first time around.

And as always, no matter how slow the plot is, there's plenty of trivia to note! Speaking of which, Boyd's online notes end at Ch. 34, although note that there are some interesting notes (composed with Boyd's help) here that go up through Ch. 38. After this, we're flying blind.

NOTES

"the oars crippled by refraction" (217) -- nice metaphor.

"my acarpous destiny" (219) -- "acarpous" means "fruitless."

"A diligent student of case histories, Dr. Van Veen never quite managed to match ardent twelve-year-old Ada with a non-delinquent, non-nymphomaniac, mentally highly developed, spiritually happy and normal English child in his files, although many similar little girls had bloomed -- and run to seed -- in the old châteaux of France and Estotiland as portrayed in extravagant romances and senile memoirs." (219) -- a self-conscious nod to the implausibility of Ada the character. Minor evidence for theories of the "Van invented Ada" variety (of which I am fond).

"Captain Grant's Microgalaxies" (220) -- Darkbloom: "known on Terra as Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant, by Jules Verne."

"ailleurs" (220) -- "go away" (?), lit. "elsewhere."

The ending of Ch. 35 has been "scrawled on a separate writing-pad page" and is apparently by a very old Van, possibly on his last night before death. It is appropriately (?) strange. Mentions of the process of composition sometimes coincide with especially abstruse and odd passages (cf. the sections alternately written by Van and Ada in Ch. 12). Is this an indication that these were written last, by an older senile Van / Ada, who either wrote strangely because they were senile or simply died before having the chance to revise this material (or both)?

"and now a century later seems to be again in vogue, so I am told, under the name of 'Scrabble,' invented by some genius quite independently from its original form or forms." (222-3) -- cf. earlier " 'We [Van and Ada in 1884] played mostly Scrabble and Snap,' said Van." (163)

"Lucette would later recall how her sister's triumphs in doubling, tripling, and even nonupling (when passing through two red squares) the numerical value of words evolved monstrous forms in her delirium during a severe streptococcal ague in September, 1888, in California." (223) -- like the Noodle Incident, this is all the more hilarious for its lack of specificity. ("Evolved monstrous forms"?)

"Baron Klim Avidov" (223) -- anagram for "Vladimir Nabokov" (Kyoto Reading Circle notes).

"Avidov . . . at a particule" (223-4) -- "The gist of this short incident is that Avidov was accused by the Englishman Keyway of his pretentions to aristocratic lineage by using the French 'de' before his name (d’Avidov)." (Kyoto Reading Circle notes)

"By July the ten A's had dwindled to nine, and the four D's to three. The missing A eventually turned up under an Aproned Armchair, but the D was lost" (224) -- A-D-A reference, of course, and maybe another arrow of time / entropy thing? (The "A" of paradisiacal Ardis lost and then regained.)

"it was pitiful to see Lucette cling to her last five letters (with none left in the box) forming the beautiful ARDIS which her governess had told her meant 'the point of an arrow' -- but only in Greek, alas." (225) -- I'm sure you could do some "clinging to Ardis" / "arrow of time" thematic stuff with this. (I have kind of a one-track mind today, it seems.)

"the amusing VANIADA" (226) -- this coinage will turn up again.

"TORFYaNUYu" (227) -- there is a peat motif (yes, you heard me, a peat motif) in this book: "Veen" for instance means "peat bog" in Dutch. (Boyd has written an article called "Ada, the Bog and the Garden: or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat: Sources and Places in Ada.")

V&A's virtuosic triumphs over Lucette in Ch. 36 leave me wondering exactly what they feel they have to prove (numerous decades later!).

"some 'blue' (peat-bog) land" (236) -- peat again.

"his "prebrandial" brandy (an ancient quip)" (238) -- cf. "he liked . . . middle-aged puns" (4).

"You look quite satanically fit, Dad." (239) -- I wonder what exactly "satanically" means on Antiterra, where religion seems to have been tweaked somewhat, and demons are benign figures. (Note the reference to the Eden story later in this chapter, and the Eden reference that dominates Ch. 15.)

" 'You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man' " (241) -- this may be fortune-teller frivolity, but it is interesting to wonder whether it has any deeper meaning in the context of the plot.

"the sweetest word in the language rhymes with 'billiard' " -- Kyoto Reading Circle: "The word is 'milliard,' thousand million, that is, billion."

"That’s very black of you" (241) -- Kyoto Reading Circle: "Converted 'white of you,' a Southern racist compliment which means 'good of you.' "

"Filius aquae" (243) -- Darkbloom: " 'son of water,' bad pun on filum aquae, the middle way, 'the thread of the stream'." But, as the Kyoto Reading Circle observes, this is also a reference to Van's parentage (he is not "filius aquae," "son of Aqua"). This chapter is packed with hints about Van and Ada's parentage, particularly to the fact that Ada is Demon's daughter.

"Tell him I’m the youngest Venutian? Does he belong, too? Show the sign? Better not. Invent." (244) -- in Ch. 28, Dick offered Van a membership to the "Villa Venus Club." Apparently Van is now a member.

"Old Demon, iridescent wings humped" (245) -- one of several references so far to Demon's "wings." Presumably a flight of fancy rather than a literal description, but then so much of Van's tale is difficult to believe that a literally winged father might not be so out of place. (But if the wings really existed we might expect some remark about how he had been named for them, when in fact we just hear that Demon is "a form of Demian or Dementius" [4].)

"which Ada de Grandfief here has twisted into English" (246) -- yet another colorful version of "translate."

" 'Which is amply sufficient," said Demon, "for my little needs, and those of my little friends.' " (247) -- cf. "Sufficient for your purpose, Van" (21).

"the unfortunate plant used to be considered by the ancient inhabitants of the Ladore region not so much as a remedy for the bite of a reptile, as the token of a very young woman’s easy delivery" (247) -- the reference to the pains of childbirth here continues the Adam and Eve reference begun in Ada's preceding line, in which she links snakes and "corruption."

" 'I'm Fanny Price, actually' . . . 'In the staircase scene' " (249) -- not having read Mansfield Park, I can't divine the significance of either of these statements. Google leads me to this: "The stairs leading to the attic also have significance in the novel. A week after Fanny’s arrival at Mansfield Park, Edmund finds his cousin sitting on the stairs that lead to the attic. Her placement on the stairs reinforces the view of Fanny as a person between two worlds. She can no longer live with her family in Portsmouth and does not feel that the Bertram house is her home either. She is never completely part of the Bertram family until later in the novel; and in her first years with the family, Fanny does not feel fully accepted as a member of the household."

"this gemel planet" (256) -- "gemel" is a heraldic term meaning "coupled" or "paired."

"the young hospital nurse Dan had been monkeying with ever since his last illness (it was, by the way, she, busybody Bess, whom Dan had asked on a memorable occasion to help him get 'something nice for a half-Russian child interested in biology')" (256) -- the 12th birthday gift Ada received and hated back in Ch. 13 ("a huge beautiful doll -- unfortunately, and strangely, more or less naked; still more strangely, with a braced right leg and a bandaged left arm, and a boxful of plaster jackets and rubber accessories, instead of the usual frocks and frills" [84]).

"certicle storms" (258) -- Darkbloom: "certicle: anagram of 'electric.' " Electricity may be taboo, but Antiterrans still need a way to refer to natural electrical phenomena. (Also brings "cervical" to mind?)

"Antiamberians" (258) -- apparently some sort of anti-electricity group. The word "electricity" itself comes from the Greek word for "amber." Philip Pullman, thinking along the same lines, had his otherworldly characters in the His Dark Materials trilogy use "anbaric" (from the Arabic for "amber") energy.

"young Bout hurried in dragging the long green cord (visibly palpitating in a series of swells and contractions rather like a serpent ingesting a field mouse) of the ornate, brass-and-nacre receiver" (260) -- a hydrodynamic telephone sure is a funny image.

"his key: 221" (262) -- Demon is linked a number of times in this Chapter to Sherlock Holmes, who lived on 221 Baker Street (Kyoto Reading Circle).

"till dee do us part" (263) -- "dee" is the first letter in Demon's name: when Demon finally discovers their affair, Ada expects him to order them to stop. Also, possibly, a reference to the negative associations of the "D" segment of the A-D-A sequence (if this book is about paradises lost and then regained, "A" is the paradise while "D" is its absence).

6. Van/Ada, Blanche/Van, Rack/Ada, Percy/Ada, Van/Cordula, Hurt/Comfort, Mpreg (Part 1, Chapters 39-43)

GENERAL REMARKS (Chs. 39-43)

Shit just got real.

NOTES

"Speaking as a character in an old novel" (266) -- this "old novel" motif is starting to get a bit worn out.

"One of your aunt's servants is the sister of one of our servants and two pretty gossips form a dangerous team" (271) -- the former servant is Blanche. (Cf. "better than waste them on her, let him give them, she said, to Blanche's lovely sister" [277].)

"Percy, you were to die very soon -- and not from that pellet in your fat leg, on the turf of a Crimean ravine, but a couple of minutes later when you opened your eyes and felt relieved and secure in the shelter of the macchie; you were to die very soon, Percy; but that July day in Ladore County, lolling under the pines, royally drunk after some earlier festivity, with lust in your heart and a sticky glass in your strong blond-haired hand, listening to a literary bore, chatting with an aging actress and ogling her sullen daughter, you reveled in the spicy situation, old sport, chin-chin, and no wonder. Burly, handsome, indolent and ferocious, a crack Rugger player, a cracker of country girls, you combined the charm of the off-duty athlete with the engaging drawl of a fashionable ass. I think what I hated most about your handsome moon face was that baby complexion, the smooth-skinned jaws of the easy shaver. I had begun to bleed every time, and was going to do so for seven decades." (273) -- enjoyably spiteful paragraph. Strange to think of Van, over ninety, having lived with Ada for decades, writing this as though still angry at Percy. (I always tend to assume that Van's uses of the first person indicate heights of emotional intensity or involvement, though that may be too simple.)

"It was, he understood, a collation of shepherds." (274) -- no idea what to make of the shepherds. Suggestions welcome.

"Ada strolled up. 'My hero,' she said, hardly looking at him, with that inscrutable air she had that let one guess whether she expressed sarcasm or ecstasy, or a parody of one or the other." (278) -- doubles, of course, as a description of Ada the book.

"We do not care to follow the thoughts troubling Ada, whose attention to her book was far shallower than might seem; we will not, nay, cannot follow them with any success, for thoughts are much more faintly remembered than shadows or colors, or the throbs of young lust, or a green snake in a dark paradise." (280-1) -- strange to point this out when the book almost never follows Ada's thoughts, and the excuse rings hollow since Van's thoughts are, by contrast, followed relentlessly. I wonder what that "green snake in a dark paradise" means. There have been various Eden references (Shattal tree, dinner party), but none that seem to match up satisfactorily with that phrase.

"Therefore we find ourselves more comfortably sitting within Van while his Ada sits within Lucette, and both sit within Van (and all three in me, adds Ada)." (281) -- all three are in Ada the book, of course . . . "and all three in me" also makes me think of the Trinity. (If older Ada is incarnating in younger Lucette, then Ada is the Father and Lucette is the Son, which would make Van the Holy Spirit, which is funny since the Holy Spirit, unlike the other two, is believed by some to be female. [Is this my silliest line of speculation yet?])

"Van was lying in his netted nest under the liriodendrons, reading Antiterrenus on Rattner." (283) -- cf. p. 230: "Van lay reading Rattner on Terra, a difficult and depressing work." Mirror-reflection motif, of course.

"I've seen him in Sexico" (286) -- now that is a good bad movie title.

"It was not the sly demon smile of remembered or promised ardor, but the exquisite human glow of happiness and helplessness. . . . They stood brow to brow, brown to white, black to black, he supporting her elbows, she playing her limp light fingers over his collarbone, and how he 'ladored,' he said, the dark aroma of her hair blending with crushed lily stalks, Turkish cigarettes and the lassitude that comes from 'lass.' " (286-7) -- the writing has returned to romantic gorgeousness; it's been a long time since we've been here. Note that the style of this passage, and the use of the adore/Ladore pun, recalls the passage on p. 158-9 when Van and Ada part for the first time. Van seems to view his relationship with Ada in the most idealized terms at moments that directly precede their partings.

"That's a beautiful passage, Van. I shall cry all night (late interpolation)." (287) -- not sure what to make of this, but it seems significant.

"she was wearing his diamonds for the first time" (288) -- apparently Van did repair the diamond necklace after all?

I love Chapter 41. Nabokov is very good at rendering the moment when it all comes crashing down, and much of Ch. 41 is a wonderfully well-written, aching and hilarious depiction of what it feels like when your brain hits a fact it just can't deal with. In a lot of Nabokov's novels, though, this moment happens at the end, while here it's right in the middle: the demonic D of the A-D-A pattern ("till Dee do us part"). An A-D-A dramatic arc, if plotted with something like "happiness" on the vertical axis, would form a "V" shape (or, if mirror-inverted -- with both paradises exposed as false? -- an "A" shape).

"her quaint English, elegiac and stilted, as spoken only in obsolete novels" (292) -- this has the form of a diss towards Blanche, but its impact is kind of distorted by the fact that all sorts of things in Ada, including Ardis Hall itself, are describes as reminiscent of "old novels." "Obsolete novels" is kind of a strange notion in the context of this book, which is itself written in an archaic mode.

" 'Van,' she said, 'I must tell you my dream before I forget. You and I were high up in the Alps . . . ' " (296) -- the coincidence of Van and Ada's dreams here recalls dream coincidences in Anna Karenina and Ulysses. (Nabokov, in this interview: "Activist, demonstration-struck students of the present decade would, I suppose, either drop my course after a couple of lectures or end by getting a fat F if they could not answer such exam questions as: Discuss the twinned-dream theme in the case of two teams of dreamers, Stephen D.-Bloom, and Vronski-Anna.")

"Aqua used to say that only a very cruel or very stupid person, or innocent infants, could be happy on Demonia, our splendid planet. Van felt that for him to survive on this terrible Antiterra, in the multicolored and evil world into which he was born, he had to destroy, or at least to maim for life, two men." (301) -- unless I'm forgetting something, this is the first appearance of either of the names of Van's planet. Given that they will appear frequently from here on out, this seems statistically unlikely to be a coincidence. It's as if Van has invented these nasty-sounding terms to express his despair at this particular moment, and only later retconned them in as "official" names for his (fantasy) planet.

I remember reading somewhere that the duel in Ch. 42 is heavily derivative of Eugene Onegin. The author I was reading claimed this as reason to doubt the duel ever actually happened. (Which makes sense if, and only if, you're working in a general framework that says Van has access to something like western literature as it exists on earth.)

"In 1884, during my first summer at Ardis, I seduced your daughter" (309) -- clarifies that Ada is Demon's daughter, in case the reader still hasn't picked up on it.

"Van noticed a speckled movement on his right: two little spectators -- a fat girl and a boy in a sailorsuit, wearing glasses, with a basket of mushrooms between them. It was not the chocolate-muncher in Cordula's compartment, but a boy very much like him, and as this flashed through Van's mind he felt the jolt of the bullet ripping off, or so it felt, the entire left side of his torso" (310-11) -- I feel like this is significant (either Cordula and the boy or their doppelgängers appear as here like angels of [near-]death?), but I have no idea where to go with it.

Van's prepared monologue to Rack (314-15) is so weird I almost want to call it another "moment of instability." Death has been an important motif up until this point; now Van meditates, seemingly without prompting, on the afterlife. The futility of this magisterial proclamation (which Rack doesn't even appear to hear) is hilarious, but the passage is unnerving in a way that goes beyond that comedic function. There is a feeling that the book is going off the rails, that we and Van, not Rack, are in fact plummeting into "the panic and pain of infinite night" (315).

"kissing her rosy hot face and kneading her soft catlike body through her black silk dress" (318) -- to contrast with the swoonyspoony purple prose in the highest-pitch V&A encounters, Van's exciting moments with other women get assigned this down-to-earth porn-novel style. (I may be imagining this contrast -- I'll have to see whether it persists in the rest of the book.)

"But, of course, an invaluable detail in that strip of thought would have been -- perhaps, next to the pitcher peri -- a glint, a shadow, a stab of Ardis." (320) -- of course Van is trying to link the death of Percy -- far away, having nothing to do with him or Ada -- with his own desire to kill Percy and its motivation. Is that all that's going on here, though? Another odd, extended passage which, like the earlier monologue, serves to remind us that we're not in Kansas/Ardis anymore. (Incidentally, in this passage two open parentheses are closed with only one close parenthesis -- this is the case both in my edition and on Ada Online. Is this meant to be unsettling? Stop me before I read into trivial details again!)

"anxious to enjoy Cordula as soon as humanly and humanely possible" (320) -- nice turn of phrase.

"When in early September Van Veen left Manhattan for Lute, he was pregnant." (325) -- a funny piece of trivia: some early editions (including some of the copies at the NYU library) have "he was pregnant" idiotically "corrected" to "she was pregnant." Anyway, this parting shot for Part 1 is a anticlimactic parody of the climactic important of pregnancy in 19th-century fiction. (In the Darkbloom notes, VN says it's specifically a reference to Kitty Levin's pregnancy in Anna Karenina.) The genesis of a creative work is a poor substitute for a real pregnancy as a culmination to a story so concerned with sex and romance -- a fact only accentuated by the relatively minor status of the creative work in question (which we'll learn about in the next section).

7. L. Van Hubbard and the Modern Science of Mental Health (Part 2, Chapters 1-5)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 2, Chs. 1-5)

This week's section is more varied than some. Van reads letters from Ada; writes a science fiction novel based on his patients' experiences; visits a chain of high-class brothels whose origins and peculiarities are described in more detail than we really need, thank you very much; riffs on dreams; and has an incredibly awkward reunion with Lucette.

NOTES

"I implore you for breath [sic! Ed.] of understanding" (332) -- there are several editor's notes in Ada's letters here (from the fictional, Nabokov-created editor). They call into question turns of phrase that seem like deliberate wordplay, which makes one wonder just who this editor is and whether their competence can be trusted. It also raises the question of why these particular instances of wordplay are being singled out in this wordplay-heavy book. Does the editor, for instance, have some grudge against Ada's (the character's) writing style?

"[Los Angeles, mid-September, 1888]" (332) -- Ada's "severe streptococcal ague," which made her delirious, occurred "in September, 1888, in California" (223). But if this has had any influence upon this letter, I can't discern it.

"He and I have gamed at Nevada, my rhyme-name town" (333) -- apparently either Vegas or Reno has been replaced with a city called "Nevada" on Antiterra. Similarly, the use of the word "Manhattan" in the book seems to indicate that instead of a New York City, Antiterra just has a city called Manhattan.

"Van, you are responsible (or Fate through you is responsible, ce qui revient au même) for having let loose something mad in me when we were only children" (334) -- the idea that Van has somehow corrupted Ada will recur.

"in early Thargelion, 1888" (335) -- Thargelion is . . . apparently the second month of spring in the Attic Greek calendar? Maybe Sam can explain this reference to me.

"as they were bound to be in the long ruin [sic! "run" in her blue stocking. Ed.]" (335) -- another problematic "sic." Also, I confess I don't know what the editor means by "in her blue stocking." Has Ada herself has made this correction in blue pen? [2024 edit: huh, apparently I didn't know the term "bluestocking" (meaning "feminist") back in 2013.]

"When Van retrieved in 1940 this thin batch of five letters, each in its VPL pink silk-paper case, from the safe in his Swiss bank where they had been preserved for exactly one half of a century, he was baffled by their small number. The expansion of the past, the luxuriant growth of memory had magnified that number to at least fifty." (336) -- this seems to call into question much of the book so far, since if Van can misremember a simple fact this severely, how the hell did he remember all of the little novelistic details he's included? Van does provide an excuse for this particular case a moment later, but this is a strong reminder that we aren't supposed to take Ada as a purely factual account.

"the impeccable paranymph" (337) -- a paranymph is an attendant in a ceremony, originally an attendant to the bridge and groom in an ancient Greek wedding.

I really like Chapter 2, mostly for the fact that it sheds light on Terra, one of this book's enduring mysteries.

"In his struggle to keep the writer of the letters from Terra strictly separate from the image of Ada, he gilt and carmined Theresa until she became a paragon of banality." (339-40) -- "carmined" here could indicate that Theresa is an analogue of Lucette, a redhead.

"his anagram-looking name, Sig Leymanksi, had been partly derived by Van from that of Aqua’s last doctor" (340) -- the doctor was "Sig Heiler" (28). Darkbloom on Sig Leymanksi: "anagram of the name of a waggish British novelist keenly interested in physics fiction." The novelist in question is Kingsley Amis.

"with Theresa swimming inside like a micromermaid" (340) -- Michael Maar in his book "Speak, Nabokov" links Lucette with the Little Mermaid of the classic fairy tale. I remember very little of his discussion, but I imagine this was part of the evidence. (The Little Mermaid of the Disney movie, which long postdates Ada, was a redhead, but I can't find any indication that this was a traditional feature.)

"a sumptuously fripped up, trite, tedious and obscure fable, with a few absolutely marvelous metaphors marring the otherwise total ineptitude of the tale." (344) -- anticipates, of course, one subset of the Terran reactions to Van's later work "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle."

"Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists)" (344) -- remember that "Osberg" is an anagram of "Borges." Ouch!

"The Perfumed Garden" (344) -- this book, a "fifteenth-century Arabic sex manual and work of erotic literature" (Wikipedia), actually exists, and according to Bobbie Ann Mason is a significant source for Ada. I don't remember much about Mason's appendix on the subject, though.

Chapter 3 is something else, that's for sure. The best interpretation I can come up with is that it, or some subset of it, is an erotic dream of Van's that has been incorporated into the text. He is clearly half-asleep as he writes the end of Chapter 2. Van's sleepy state of mind may explain the sudden mentions of Eric van Veen and his dream in that section, which at that point have never been mentioned and are a mystery to the reader. If Van falls asleep with thoughts of Eric van Veen in his mind, it makes sense that he would dream of floramors. The narrative action in Ch. 3 (what little of it there is) has the sudden shifts and strangeness of dreams, and the exposition has the implausibility of the sort of "backstory" that dreams often present as given knowledge, as well as the extravagant elaborations often characteristic of sexual fantasies. Having awoken, Van recounts his dream (Ch. 3) and then, inspired, proceeds to riff on dreams in general, and erotic dreams in particular, in an imagined psychology lecture (Ch. 4).

There are problems with this. The most obvious is, of course, that if Van is doing this, why doesn't he tell us? It seems especially perverse to spend a brief paragraph on erotic dreams -- beginning with "Van's sexual dreams are embarrassing to describe" -- if in fact the previous chapter was an extended description of one. There's also the fact that the Venus club has been mentioned before, so we're clearly supposed to believe it exists, even if we don't believe every detail from Ch. 3. And although much of the design of the Villa Venus club resembles a sexual fantasy, there's actually a pre-existing justification for this in the idea that it was the sexual fantasy of a horny teenager, realized in reality after his death.

"David van Veen, a wealthy architect of Flemish extraction (in no way related to the Veens of our rambling romance)" (347) -- a reminder that "van Veen" is, in the real world, usually encountered as a Dutch surname. So if we want to play the plausibility game, it seems more likely that David and Eric van Veen were real names, and "Ivan Veen" a pseudonym inspired by them, than vice versa. (But since so many Nabokov characters have zany names, this is probably a pointless exercise, unless we want to call into doubt absolutely everything.)

"a chain of palatial brothels that his inheritance would allow him to establish all over 'both hemispheres of our callipygian globe' " (348) -- that's definitely the best use of the word "callipygian" I've ever seen. (Not that it has much competition.)

Note that, according to Nabokov in an interview, the image of Van holding a young prostitute in a ruined villa was the first seed of Ada the novel in his mind, and he was pleased with himself for managing to work it into the finished product.

"impeccable buttocks" (351) -- a funny phrase given the etymologically literal meaning of "impeccable": "unable to sin."

"a well-known oneirotic device" (354) -- a hint that this a dream.

"subsidunt montes et juga celsa ruunt" (355) -- "mountains subside and heights deteriorate."

"was not sure if her name was really Adora, as everybody maintained" (357) -- compare to earlier "Adula" (168), formed by merging the names of Ada and Cordula.

"but the soft little creature in Van's desperate grasp was Ada" (358) -- this could mean several things. Most conservatively, Van is trying to recapture Ardis by imagining that prostitutes like this one are Ada. But it is also possible that this is a literal description of a dream shift: a stranger in his dream has just turned into Ada. This seems especially plausible given the way the word "Ada" comes at the end of the sentence, forming the "punchline" of the sentence and perhaps of the whole chapter. This kind of ambiguity is characteristic of Van's style (remember Demon's "wings" -- and there will be more examples).

"Van Veen [as also, in his small way, the editor of Ada]" (365) -- the brackets seem to indicate that this comment is from the editor, but then the lack of an "Ed." seems to indicate otherwise. Maybe Van is imitating the editor.

"At sixteen she looked considerably more dissolute than her sister had seemed at that fatal age." (367) -- the use of the word "fatal" in this book is very odd (see e.g. Ada as "pale fatal sister" [307]). How is sixteen a "fatal" age? "Fatal" can mean something like "fateful" and I assume that's the primary meaning in most of these cases. That the word has another, more common meaning provides resonance with the death motif and a link between death and fate.

"Two ideas were locked up in a slow dance, a mechanical menuet, with bows and curtseys: one was "We-have-so-much-to say"; the other was 'We have absolutely nothing to say.' " (370) -- that's a good way of putting it.

"ejaculated Lucette" (370) -- the beginning (I think) of a series of silly sexual innuendoes in this scene, similar to those in the early Ardis sections. Intuitively enough, this tendency toward innuendo seems to be a hallmark of scenes in which Van is in the presence of an attractive woman and doesn't have a steady girlfriend.

"[thus in the MS. Ed.]" -- we saw this phrase once before, in Part 1 Ch. 13 (p. 79). There, too, Van wrote the start of a paragraph twice. I would conjecture that this mistake reflects the feverish anxiety that characterizes the present chapter -- which Van may be reliving as he writes -- except I don't think anything similar can be said of Ch. 13. (This could also be an indication that these chapters were written late, and thus revised relatively little before Van's death.)

"It certainly came from Lucette's sister. He knew that shade and that shape. "That shade of blue, that shape of you" (corny song on the Sonorola)." (372) -- indication that Ada writes in blue pen? (See earlier "blue stocking.")

"The mental in Van always rimmed the sensuous: unforgettable, roughish, villous, Villaviciosa velour." (373) -- sensuous words for a sensuous sensation. "Villous": "(of a structure, esp. the epithelium) Covered with villi." ("Villi": "small, finger-like projections that protrude from the epithelial lining of the intestinal wall.") "Villaviciosa" is the name of several places in Spain and the Philippines. "Velour": "A plush woven fabric resembling velvet, chiefly used for soft furnishings, clothing, and hats."

"[quite possibly, this is not remembered speech but an extract from her letter or letters. Ed.]" (374) -- this could probably be said about almost any of the speech in this book, couldn't it?

"We were Mongolian tumblers, monograms, anagrams, adalucindas." (375) -- cf. the description of Marina as experienced by Demon: "an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a geminate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations." (19)

"campophone" (376) -- could be from Latin "campus" (field) or the Greek root "kamp-" meaning "bend." The latter seems more likely, especially since "phone" is Greek and we've seen "dorophone" from Greek "hydro." It's unclear what a "campophone" is, and since it affects the radiators, it seems to be a type of dorophone.

"polliphone" (376) -- could be from Latin "pollex" (thumb) or Greek "polloi" (many, majority). (I don't actually know Greek so I could be screwing up these Greek roots.) Might also be a reference to Pollux, one of two famous twins? The phones are morphing, like Abraham Milton / Milton Abraham / Abraham Lincoln.

"Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse." (377) -- as I mentioned a while ago, Bergson seems to have been a source for Van's, and Nabokov's, views of time. (From this interview: "At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin.")

"Vandemonian" (377) -- "a white inhabitant of Tasmania," according to Merriam-Webster.

"A ribald contemporary of Justinus, the Roman scholar." (384) -- at least on Terra, this is false, as Herodas and Justin were separated by several centuries. (That's one thing that's nice about the alternate world: it gives Van an alibi for each lapse in his erudition.)

"campophoned" (385) -- back to "campophone" from "polliphone."

" 'I also know,' said Lucette as if continuing their recent exchange, 'who he is.' She pointed to the inscription 'Voltemand Hall' on the brow of the building from which they now emerged. Van gave her a quick glance -- but she simply meant the courtier in Hamlet." (386) -- Voltemand was the pseudonym under which Letters From Terra was published, hence Van's misinterpretation.

8. Cameras and Obscurities (Part 2, Chapters 6-9)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 2, Chs. 6-9)

Ardis regained? Peeping Kim. Two sisters and a brother. Three sisters.

NOTES

"He . . . had a structurally perfect stool (its cruciform symmetry reminding him of the morning before his duel)" (389) -- Van has aesthetic standards for everything, it seems. As it turns out, if we go back to Part 1 Ch. 42 -- the morning before Van's duel -- we find the very same phrase ("He shaved, disposed of two blood-stained safety blades by leaving them in a massive bronze ashtray, had a structurally perfect stool" [309-10]). I remember Boyd pointing this out in The Place of Consciousness. Apparently some reviewers complained about the repetition, but Boyd claims that they don't appreciate the "structural perfection" of the whole book, in which repetitions have some special role. (I don't remember this part of Boyd's argument very well -- it struck me as pretty silly and hence I have retained only this, its silliest detail.)

"libellula" (390) -- "a genus of dragonflies, commonly called Skimmers" (Wikipedia). Since Van "broke down on '…ulla,' " what he's actually said is "I saw you circling above me on libel," but I dunno if that has any significance.

"denunciation of demoniac life" (391) -- presumably "demoniac life" means "life on Demonia" (similar to e.g. "earthly existence"), but the associations of the word "demon" in this book are complex and I don't really know what to make of them. There's the planet Demonia (Antiterra), V&A's father Demon, incidental uses of words like "demoniac" and "satanic," and the fact that demons are good rather than evil figures in Antiterran religion. As Maar has noted, there's a longstanding association between demons/hell and pedophilia in Nabokov, perhaps indicating that N identifies pedophilia as some sort of ultimate or absolute evil -- e.g. Humbert Humbert says that the girls to whom he is attracted have a "not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac)" nature, and in Nabokov's early poem "Lilith," the pedophilic narrator realizes in the last line that he is in hell.

"Veen and Dean" (393) -- this seems to encourage us to pronounce "Veen" to rhyme with "Dean," for symmetry -- but then see e.g. "Vain Van Veen" (299), which gives an identical push in the opposite direction.

"He was omniscient. Better say, omni-incest" (394) -- someone should write an article called "The Omni-Incest Narrator in Ada."

"mossio votre cossin" (396) -- "monsieur your cousin" (Darkbloom).

"Mademoiselle n'aurait jamais dû recevoir ce gredin" (397) -- "should have never received that scoundrel" (Darkbloom).

"Sumerechnikov! He took sumerographs of Uncle Vanya years ago." (399) -- Darkbloom: "His name comes from Russ. sumerki, twilight; see also p. 43." The Darkbloom annotation for p. 43 identifies sumerki as "dusk" rather than "twilight." On p. 43 itself, we find "The late Sumerechnikov, American precursor of the Lumière brothers, had taken Ada’s maternal uncle in profile with upcheeked violin, a doomed youth, after his farewell concert." The Lumiere brothers were real people, the inventors of the earliest motion-picture equipment in history. This all sheds some light on Van's quip "The Twilight before the Lumières" (399).

The density of unusual words ("leering caruncula in the unreticent reticulation" [401]), and of multilingual wordplay, has increased in this chapter, possibly to accompany Ada's return to the frame.

"it was Mr Ben Wright's last petard at Ardis" (401) -- Darkbloom: "Mr Ben Wright, a poet in his own right, is associated throughout with pets (farts)." Wright was "fired after letting winds go free while driving Marina and Mlle Larivière home" (140), and in 1888 he has been replaced as coachman by a guy named . . . Trofim Fartukov (actually from Russ. fartuk, apron). This also (see p. 418) appears to be the true origin of "pet" as V&A's pet name for Lucette. It is perhaps a sign of the basic goodness of our blessed Terra that no scholar, to my knowledge, has written at any length about the intricacies of farting in Ada.

"Bright derision can easily grade, through a cline of glee, into a look of rapture" (402) -- good sentence.

"this Love under the Lindens by one Eelmann transported into English by Thomas Gladstone" (403) -- Darkbloom: "O'Neil, Thomas Mann, and his translator tangle in this paragraph." We can add "transport" to the stack of derisive replacements for "translate."

"But, in the sudden storm, calculations went to the canicular devils." (403) -- cf. "l’ardeur de la canicule" and "the ardor of your little canicule" (95). "Canicule" refers to the "dog days" of summer ("the hot period between early July and early September").

"Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre!" (406) -- Darkbloom explains all. "Foute: French swear word made to sound 'foot.' " "Ars: Lat., art." "Carte du Tendre: 'Map of Tender Love,' sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_of_Tendre )

"I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle." (406) -- trivia note: in Nabokov's last novel, Look At The Harlequins!, the protagonist, an alternate universe version of Nabokov, writes a body of work that strongly resembles Nabokov's own. His equivalent of Ada is titled "Ardis." (The actual book "was entitled at first Villa Venus, then The Veens, then Ardor, and finally Ada," according to this essay.)

"Knabenkräuter" (408) -- Darkbloom: "Germ., orchids (and testacles)."

"She married our Russian coachman . . . Oh she did? That's delicious. Madame Trofim Fartukov. I would never have thought it." (408) -- why doesn't Van remember this from Ada's letter? (" . . . as your sweet Cinderella de Torf (now Madame Trofim Fartukov) used to say . . . " [334].)

"She had never realized, she said again and again (as if intent to reclaim the past from the matter-of-fact triviality of the album), that their first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis had become a sacred secret and creed, throughout the countryside. Romantically inclined handmaids, whose reading consisted of Gwen de Vere and Klara Mertvago, adored Van, adored Ada, adored Ardis's ardors in arbors. Their swains, plucking ballads on their seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom or in old rose gardens (while the windows went out one by one in the castle), added freshly composed lines -- naive, lackey-daisical, but heartfelt -- to cyclic folk songs. Eccentric police officers grew enamored with the glamour of incest. Gardeners paraphrased iridescent Persian poems about irrigation and the Four Arrows of Love. Nightwatchmen fought insomnia and the fire of the clap with the weapons of Vaniada's Adventures. Herdsmen, spared by thunderbolts on remote hill-sides, used their huge "moaning horns" as ear trumpets to catch the lilts of Ladore. Virgin chatelaines in marble-floored manors fondled their lone flames fanned by Van's romance. And another century would pass, and the painted word would be retouched by the still richer brush of time." (409) -- this delightful paragraph seems like a particularly overt and silly instance of the kind of tall-tale embellishment that we are supposed to imagine Van and Ada have applied to most parts of their story (to one extent or another).

Chapter 8 starts off with lots of long jeweled sentences, then descends into obscure weirdness after the Veens get drunk.

" 'Van, too, was upset,' replied Ada cryptically and grazed with freshly rouged lips tipsy Lucette's fanciest freckle." (413) -- notice how the sound echoes here (cr[yptically]/gr[azed]/fr[eshly]/fr[eckle], [graz]ed/[roug]ed, lips/tips[y], f[anciest]/f[reckle]) create the sensory impression of the words "grazing" one another.

"Nikak-s net" (415) -- Darkbloom: "Russ., certainly not."

"vorschmacks" (416) -- Darkbloom: "Germ., hors-d'oeuvres."

"in a nulliverse, in Rattner's 'menald world' where the only principle is random variation" (416) -- "menald": "speckled, variegated." Not sure what Lucette is getting at here.

"you cannot demand pudicity on the part of a delphinet!" (416) -- "delphinet" appears to be a Nabokovian coinage. It seems to be a diminutive of some "delph-" word . . . the flower genus "Delphinium"? The name "Delphine"? Suggestions welcome.

"the flat palpitating belly of a seasand nymph" (418) -- Lucette/mermaid connection.

"Thus seen from above" (418) -- the long, elaborate visual description here is the opposite of the quickly escalating action one might expect from an erotic scene like this. The joke is how far this passage is from ordinary sex writing; it's hard to imagine anyone getting turned on by it. (Which recalls the debate over whether Lolita was pornographic.)

". . . but I know somebody who is not simply a cat, but a polecat, and that's Cordula Tobacco alias Madame Perwitsky." (420) -- huh??? Google searching for "polecat slang" reveals only that in the South it means "skunk," and a "perwitsky" is apparently a "tiger weasel." No idea what she means here.

"After a while he adored [sic! Ed.] the pancakes" (420) -- OK, the editor has a point here. If this is wordplay on "ordered," it's pretty feeble. There may be an element of self-parody here -- after all this isn't too far from some of the more frivolous of Van's/Nabokov's clearly intentional jokes.

"Esmeralda and mermaid" (421) -- Lucette/mermaid.

"for the first time in my fire [thus in the manuscript, for 'life.' Ed.]" (421) -- similar to the case just mentioned. I wonder what we're meant to make of the varying frequency of editorial comments -- most chapters have none, but (e.g.) Chs. 1, 5, and 8 of Part 2 have several. Maybe this is an indication of compositional order.

"The whole matter secretly nauseated Van (so that, by contrast, her Natural History passion acquired a nostalgic splendor)." (425) -- there's a wry nod to the nature of adolescent love in the fact that Van, though obsessed with Ada, never actually shares her central passions. First he's bored with her interest in natural history, then he's so bored with her interest in acting that he looks back fondly on the natural history phase.

"I seem to have always felt, for example, that acting should be focused not on 'characters,' not on 'types' of something or other, not on the fokus-pokus of a social theme, but exclusively on the subjective and unique poetry of the author" (246) -- Reminder Number (n+1) That We Are Reading A Vladimir Nabokov Novel

"In 'real' life we are creatures of chance in an absolute void" (426) -- cf. Lucette's "in a nulliverse, in Rattner's 'menald world' where the only principle is random variation" (416). As before, I'm not sure what we are supposed to make of this idea. There's a recurring idea, I think, that Antiterra is variegated/motley/diverse, perhaps in a "random" way ("the multicolored and evil world into which he was born" [301]). Rattner's "menald world" is presumably Antiterra. Does Terra, by contrast, possess some sort of unity or harmony?

"so that the title of the play might have been The Three Sisters" -- this (technically just "Three Sisters") is in fact the title of the real play on Terra. Much of the rest of this chapter probably makes more sense if you've read the play . . .

"We all know those old wardrobes in old hotels in the Old World subalpine zone." (430) -- but of course!

"the rose sore of Eros alone" (431) -- oh my god, this is a double anagram and a really good phrase in its own right. Picture me as Sweet Bro stricken with awe.

9. The Many-Worlds Interpretation (Part 2, Chapter 10 to Part 3, Chapter 4)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 2, Ch. 10 to Part 3, Ch. 4)

Where Part 1 ended with a parody climax, Part 2 ends with a real climax -- in fact two real climaxes, the latter of which is suddenly defused in one of this weird book's weirdest moments.

Then, after a lurching fast-forward through many Ada-less years, we get yet another cringe-inducing encounter with desperate Lucette in Part 3 Ch. 3. At this point, Van's refusal to indulge Lucette's desires is beginning to seem almost perverse; it's understandable that he doesn't want to lead her on when he doesn't love her, but that kind of consideration hasn't stopped him from becoming involved with other women. For much of the book Van has come off simply as an amoral aesthete, but as we near the end, he is -- between the blinding of Kim and his conduct with Lucette -- starting to seem like something much worse.

This raises a number of questions: how are we supposed to feel about the coming Van-Ada reunion (which we know is happening because of Ada's annotations to the manuscript) if Van is such a bastard? And why, when Van makes up numerous details (e.g. in the Ardis chapters) that he couldn't possibly have remembered, does he allow himself to come off so badly in the latter parts of the book? If he has no commitment to strict factual accuracy, why not just twist the facts to make himself look better in the Lucette scenes? It would be one thing if Van's guilt over his own mistakes were a major theme of his book (and it may in fact be, in some hidden sense), but Van is curiously silent on these issues, as though expecting the reader to take his bad behavior in stride. Issues like these make this book (to me) both fascinating and intensely creepy in a way that would not be possible if Van's flaws were dealt with more overtly.

NOTES

"He set off at once for Manhattan, eyes blazing, wings whistling." -- Demon's wings again.

"The only personage they had not reckoned with was the old scoundrel usually portrayed as a skeleton or an angel" (433) -- so Antiterrans depict Death roughly the same way Terrans do, despite the differences in religion.

"but [Dan's] death had shown an artistic streak because of its reflecting (as his cousin, not his doctor, instantly perceived) the man’s latterly conceived passion for the paintings, and faked paintings, associated with the name of Hieronymus Bosch." (433) -- Dan, like Aqua, has descended into madness before dying. There is a symmetry to this: each of V&A's parents has a sibling (of the same gender) who has died in this way, and madness is now attested to on both the Durmanov and Veen sides of the family. There is an antisymmetry in the content of the madness -- Aqua dies dreaming of heaven-like Terra, while Dan dies haunted by visions out of Bosch's depiction of hell. (According to Boyd the reference here is to Bosch's triptych The Last Judgment. Demon brings up "that other triptych," the Garden of Earthly Delights; Mason's book contains some discussion of The Garden of Earthly Delights as a broader influence upon Ada.) Have Van or Ada inherited the mental illness that plagued their aunt and uncle? (Who are their putative mother and putative father -- and what's the significant of that?) It's interesting that Nabokov encourages us to think about this possibility just before the bizarre ending of Part 3.

"might still be living with dull little Cordula de Prey . . . but Cordula was not dull and had not been present" (434) -- Van invents a thought process for Demon, then disputes it. The point of contention is odd, since Cordula has come off as pretty "dull" in all of Van's own accounts of her thus far.

"looking forward to another day of increasing happiness (with yet another uncomfortable little edge smoothed away, another raw kink in the past so refashioned as to fit into the new pattern of radiance)" (434) -- a nice statement of Van's broader MO.

"According to Bess (which is 'fiend' in Russian)" (435) -- actually, it means "demon" (e.g. Dostoyevsky's novel "Bésy," usually translated "Demons").

"how incestuously -- c’est le mot -- art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet" (436) -- this remark of Demon's calls back to the peculiar phrase " 'incestuous' (whatever that term means) pleasure" (19) used to describe Demon's enjoyment of his mistress Marina's similarity to his wife Aqua.

"what we have to study [in Bosch], as I was telling your cousins, is the joy of the eye, the feel and taste of the woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with him, or the exquisite surprise of an unusual orifice" (437) -- hilarious.

"Jeroen Anthniszoon van Äken" (438) -- the real name of Hieronymus Bosch.

"hell curs, k chertyam sobach’im" (438) -- the Russian is "to hell's hounds" or "to the canine devils" (so roughly the equivalent of "hell curs"). "Canicule" may be relevant here (Ada/hell connection)? The Russian phrase appears two other times in Ada, translated differently each time: "hydrodynamic telephones and miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach'im (Russian 'to the devil')" (23), and "But, added Ada, just before being whisked away and deprived of her crayon (tossed out by Marina k chertyam sobach'im, to hell's hounds" (151).

"Norbert von Miller" (440) -- mentioned earlier by Marina on p. 261.

"Kim who would have bothered Ada again had he not been carried out of his cottage with one eye hanging on a red thread and the other drowned in its blood" (441) -- so Van did blind Kim after all. (That Van actively did this -- that Kim wasn't just a casualty of coincidence like Percy and Rack -- is confirmed at the end of the chapter.) Boyd, in The Place of Consciousness, makes much of the fact that this gruesome detail is mentioned almost in passing and could easily be overlooked in a book with so many lurid incidental details. To fully grasp the nastiness of Van's character, we must pay attention.

"his father had made himself up as Boris Godunov" (443) -- an play by Pushkin titled "Boris Godunov" was adapted by Mussorgsky into an opera, so this calls back to the bad Eugene Onegin adaptation Demon watches in Part 1 Ch. 2.

"My first is a vehicle that twists dead daisies around its spokes; my second is Oldmanhattan slang for 'money' " (444) -- a "van" is certainly a vehicle, though I can't find anything online about "veen" as slang for money.

"My second is also the meeting place of two steep slopes." (444) -- "ravine"?

"Right-hand lower drawer of my practically unused new desk -- which is quite as big as Dad’s, with Sig’s compliments." (444) -- this Freud joke is one of the several details in this passage that remind us of Aqua's suicide.

"Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened -- or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind. Anyway, what he held in his right hand was no longer a pistol but a pocket comb which he passed through his hair at the temples." (445) -- moment of instability! In the poem Pale Fire, the phrase "[And here time forked.]" appears shortly before Hazel Shade's suicide. In this passage the idea of forking time is used to illustrate a suicide attempt that Van doesn't go through with. But is that all? The idea of changing to a different time track, in which Van is holding a comb rather than a gun, could just be a colorful way of saying that Van putting down the gun. But given the resonances of madness that have build up in the course of this chapter -- and Van's enduring interest in the nature of time -- this could well be more literal than that. One interpretation is that the rest of the book from hereon out is fantasy, and the novel is an elaborate suicide note.

"There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do." (446) -- elaboration of the earlier moment of instability, and a return of the "dream" motif that taunts the reader throughout Ada. On one level, this could be a simple statement that Van is ready to end the chapter (and Part 2) rather than ramble about further in an effectively inexhaustible trove of relevant memories. If we want to adopt something like the "suicide note" theory, this is instead a statement that other alternative futures -- in which Van does not commit suicide -- can be imagined, but the one he has started to sketch here (in which he blinds Kim, is reunited with Ada, etc.) "will do" -- and indeed it forms the basis of the remainder of the novel.

Time has moved more quickly in each successive section of Ada. Part 1 covers four years and takes up half the book. Part 2 does five years in half that length. Now Part 3 Ch. 1 fast-forwards through seven years of Van's life in a few pages. As a reader, it's easy to forget just how much time is elapsing here, and it can be illuminating to remind oneself of it. For instance, the meeting with Greg and Cordula in Ch. 2 seems like a relatively minor scene, not too different from many of the earlier scenes involving secondary characters -- but it is only the second event (after Marina's death) in seven years that Van has deemed worthy of relating in any detail! The most obvious explanation for this is that Greg and Cordula are people he remembers from his Ardis days, and so they are important to him -- and to the central story of this book -- in a way that many of the events of this period were not. (Moreover, it is Greg who tells Van that Lucette is in town, and thus precipitates his much more significant meeting with her.) I also wonder, though, whether Van's feelings for Cordula aren't deeper than he has let on (which would explain that defensive [?] "Cordula was not dull" earlier).

"Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited." (450) -- another suggestion that Van and/or Ada are destined to end up on Terra ("You’ll live to reach Terra, and come back a wiser and merrier man" [241]).

"She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five." (457) -- as before with Cordula, the language here is blunt and unromantic.

"Invitation to a Climax" (459) -- this parody of the title of another VN novel invites one to think about "beheading" as a metaphor for male orgasm.

"For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. . . . a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarily [sic] postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman" (460-1) -- this description of Van standing behind Lucette is meant to remind us of a famous Toulouse-Lautrec poster.

" ' . . I’m like Dolores—when she says she’s "only a picture painted on air." ' 'Never could finish that novel -- much too pretentious.' " (464) -- a joke about Lolita, of course. The phrase "only a picture painted on air" doesn't get any Google hits that aren't related to Ada, incidentally.

"It’s safer and faster by plane" (465) -- as far as I can tell, this is the first mention of planes on Antiterra. (Flight of some sort has always been possible there, however, by means of the "jikkers.") Planes appeared earlier in Aqua's visions of Terra: "she saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent from dark to shining sea" (21), so this is one indication that (because of the temporal discrepancy between the two worlds) Terran visions can actually foretell what will happen on Antiterra. Several details in this chapter and the next seem to indicate that electricity has recently been unbanned (another noted feature of Terra was that electricity was used freely).

"I have an important, important telephone call to make, but I don’t want you to listen" (466) -- "telephone," not "dorophone," since they're using electricity now.

" 'That’s rich,' said Lucette, 'you’ve gone far enough with me on several occasions, even when I was a kid; your refusing to go further is a mere quibble on your part; and besides, besides you’ve been unfaithful to her with a thousand girls, you dirty cheat!' " (467) -- this all seems pretty undeniable . . . indeed, as I said above, Van's refusal to become involved with Lucette has grown to seem almost perverse given the rest of his personality.

"What was he? Who was he? Why was he? He thought of his slackness, clumsiness, dereliction of spirit." (471) -- both the introspection and the self-criticism in this chapter are utterly atypical of Van, though it wasn't until I encountered them here that I realized just how absent they've been from the preceding 470 pages.

"In his sadder moments, as now, he attributed at least part of his 'success' to his rank, to his wealth, to the numerous donations, which (in a kind of extension of his overtipping the haggard beggars who cleaned rooms, manned lifts, smiled in hotel corridors) he kept showering upon worthwhile institutions and students." (471-2) -- this, for instance, is startling. Until this point, money has very rarely entered Van's thinking (except when e.g. he tells Demon that he isn't financially dependent on him because of his inheritance from Aqua), and his judgments of value have tended to align frictionlessly with the striations of aristocratic rank (e.g. Cordula, whom he doesn't much respect, is "quite a notch below our set" [330], to say nothing of the way he treats various servants, maids, etc). It's hard to imagine the entitled, amoral Van we know agonizing over whether he really deserves his success (if that is indeed what is happening here).

10. Rolling in the Deep (Part 3, Chapters 5-8)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 3, Chs. 5-8)

Interviewer: There seem to be similarities in the rhythm and tone of Speak, Memory and Ada, and in the way you and Van retrieve the past in images. Do you both work along similar lines?

Nabokov: The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind. It is a familiar embarrassment that I face with very faint qualms, particularly since I am not really aware of any special similarities -- just as one is not aware of sharing mannerisms with a detestable kinsman. I loathe Van Veen.

(Source: 1969 interview with Time magazine)

Things are starting to become clear -- at least in a sense.

Lucette's death in Part 3 Ch. 5 is arguably the central scene of the book, and it rearranges our conception of everything around it. Lucette begins to seem more important than she had originally seemed (in this book entitled "Ada" -- not "The Veens," which was one of Nabokov's working titles). There is a reality to her plight and Van's shame in that chapter that is lacking in many of the Ada scenes, particularly in the unconvincing and artificial reunion with Ada that follows in Part 3 Ch. 8. Moreover, much of the book's thematic skeleton seems to have radiated outward from Lucette's death rather than from anything having to do with Ada.

Consider, for instance, the influence of Lucette's watery death on Part 1 Chapter 3, in which Van first begins to explicitly lay out the nature of Antiterra. Van's putative mother, really his aunt (just as Lucette is merely a half-sister), named Aqua, encounters a series of comedically negligent psychologists and kills herself by taking an overdose of pills. In Aqua's vision of Terra, people freely use electricity, but on Antiterra electricity is banned, and the only consequence that is mentioned with any frequency over the course of the book is the banning of telephones -- such as the electric telephone on which Van has his shameful conversation with Lucette just before her death. (They have been replaced with devices that use water.) The chapter opens with the sentence:

"The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of 'Terra,' are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans -- and not to grave men or gravemen." (17)

Electricity is banned (which pretty much means "telephones are banned") because of "the L disaster" -- and now we can be pretty sure what that "L" really stands for! The book is addressed to "lemans" (lovers) rather than "gravemen": Van is saying that he plans to write about the love between him and Ada, not the grave matter of Lucette's death. But as we know, Van can't seem to keep either death or Lucette from intruding into his chronicle. By Part 3 the original plan seems to have derailed, and in Part 3 Ch. 5 the book reaches its climax in, yes, a "treatment at length" of "the details of the L disaster."

"Gravemen" brings Hamlet to mind, which in turn brings to mind Van's comparison of Lucette to Ophelia. Van's refusal to sleep with Lucette is indeed kind of Hamlet-like. Van explains his behavior not as assumed madness but as a supposed concern for Lucette's own well-being. But this concern clashes with the amoral and sexually uninhibited nature of the Van Veen we have known so far, and ends up seeming as strange as Hamlet's behavior. One could say that Van's interactions with Ada are over-analyzed, and his interactions with Lucette are under-analyzed. My hunch is that the latter are more true to life, and that Van's relentless "concern" for Lucette makes more sense in some real context which he does not deign to give us, instead turning away from Lucette again and again to focus on Ada.

Compared to the intensity and reality of the Tobakoff chapter, the scenes with Ada that close out Part 3 are thin, dull, and artificial. The sense of unreality is heightened by the mentions of "life forking" and Van's fake death. Even by the rather unreal standards set up in earlier V&A scenes, these interactions feel out-of-character: Ada is saddled with some very un-Ada-esque lines ("The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?" [530]), while Van's lines are jarringly corny ("Castle True, Castle Bright! Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!" [ibid]). Plausibility -- even plausibility of Van Veen's peculiar sort -- is fraying at the seams; Van's heart just doesn't seem to be in this anymore. The book is almost over, and we know that Van and Ada will (at last!) be reunited by the end . . . but with so little of the book left, there is no hope that this reunion will be a romantic triumph rather than a shambling, perfunctory stumble across the finish line.

Given the significance of telephones in Ada, I'm inclined to think that Van's phone conversation with Lucette might be the very center of the book:

"No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him: 'Mozhno pridti teper' (can I come now)?” asked Lucette. 'Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),' answered Van. A small pause followed; then she hung up." (491)

"I'm not alone" -- the lie that is at the root of all of Van's shame? It's this kind of thinking that leads me to my favorite theory of Ada: that Van only had one sister, who was basically Lucette. Ada Veen, Van's perfect double, is an invention made to justify statements like that "I'm not alone," when in reality Van is alone with only his shame over Lucette's death as company. ("Lucette" comes from "Lucile," the name of Chateaubriand's beloved sister. "Ada" is a palindrome, a mathematical contrivance, a mere mirror-flipping of the Vs in "Van Veen" -- and born from Van's torment ["of hell"].)

NOTES

"Professor Counterstone" (474) -- play on "Antiterra" (stone/earth).

"His gaze, traveling on, tripped over Dr. Ivan Veen and pulled up at the next name. What constricted his heart? Why did he pass his tongue over his thick lips? Empty formulas befitting the solemn novelists of former days who thought they could explain everything." (475) -- an interesting twist on the "old novels" motif. Ada as a whole presents itself as a man's self-conscious attempt to cram his life story into the conventions of "old novels," and now here is a detail that he feels he can't fit into the mold.

"Van interrupted Lucette’s nervous patter by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his: Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain!" (477) -- huh?

"To most of the Tobakoff’s first-class passengers the afternoon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Iceland and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open-air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial gusts" (477) -- could be a reflection of the Antiterran climate getting colder at the latitude of Ardis. Then again, it could just be a cold day.

"Spring in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial island, had given a nectarine hue to her limbs" (477) -- "Spring in Fialta" is the title of a famous Nabokov story. Note also "Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up" (477).

"Van peeled off his jersey and stayed on for a while, brooding, fingering the little green-gemmed case with five Rosepetal cigarettes, trying to enjoy the heat of the platinum sun in its aura of “film-color” but only managing to fan, with every shiver and heave of the ship, the fire of evil temptation." (482) -- temptation here is "evil" . . . strange how normally dissolute Van hews to something like a moral principle in this one case, with no clear motivation and with disastrous consequences. Why?

"He discovered an insidious omission in his galleys where an entire line was wanting, with the vitiated paragraph looking, however, quite plausible -- to an automatic reader -- since the truncated end of one sentence, and the lower-case beginning of the other, now adjacent, fitted to form a syntactically correct passage" (484) -- since the book we are reading is an incompletely edited manuscript, the suggestion seems to be that this sort of insidious error might also be present in it. Maddening!

"had he not recollected (a recollection confirmed by his typescript) that at this point should have come a rather apt, all things considered, quotation: Insiste, anime meus, et adtende fortiter (courage, my soul and press on strongly)." (484) -- from Augustine's Confessions. Seems to underscore how out-of-character Van's stoicism is, since Van and Augustine are normally polar opposites in many respects (e.g. self-esteem).

"It’s crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating jazzband." (484) -- amusing nod to the origins of the word "jazz."

"As he gloomily looked at her thin bare shoulders, so mobile and tensile that one wondered if she could not cross them in front of her like stylized angel wings" (485) -- interesting parallel to Demon's wings. Remember that Lucette, unlike Van and Ada, doesn't have "demon blood."

"He could describe her dress only as struthious (if there existed copper-curled ostriches)" (486) -- struthious: "of or relating to the ostriches and related birds." You learn something new every day.

"Dolores, a dancing girl (lifted from Osberg’s novella, as was to be proved in the ensuing lawsuit)" (488) -- recall that on Antiterra, Osberg (anagram of Borges) is the author of a book that resembles Lolita.

One can probably a lot of interpretive mileage out of "Don Juan's Last Fling," the movie that Van and Lucette watch. Low-hanging fruit: is Van (rhymes with Don) himself sort of a combination of Don Juan and Don Quixote, like the protagonist of DJLF?

"In a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is right, I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the door (it swung open at once, but then closed of its own accord)and using a temporary expedient less far-fetched than that hit upon by Father Sergius (who chops off the wrong member in Count Tolstoy’s famous anecdote), vigorously got rid of the prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years ago." (490) -- both first and third person appear here in the same sentence, perhaps a sign of Van's state of agitation while writing this passage. I'm not sure what "succession of words" he's referring to. Is there a rhyme in this sentence or somewhere in the surrounding passages?

"He welcomed the thought which suddenly seemed so absolutely true, and new, and as lividly real as the slowly widening gap of the sitting room’s doorway, namely, that on the morrow (which was at least, and at best, seventy years away) he would explain to Lucette, as a philosopher and another girl’s brother, that he knew how agonizing and how absurd it was to put all one’s spiritual fortune on one physical fancy and that his plight closely resembled hers, but that he managed, after all, to live, to work, and not pine away because he refused to wreck her life with a brief affair and because Ada was still a child." (491) -- the similarity of Van and Lucette's situations is interesting. As an excuse for not becoming involved with Lucette, this is pretty transparently feeble, since Van is still so clearly invested in getting back together with Ada.

"At that point the surface of logic began to be affected by a ripple of sleep, but he sprang back into full consciousness at the sound of the telephone." (491) -- if Van invented Antiterra, then it's possible that stye presence of telephones (not dorophones!) at several important moments late in the book, such as this one, gave Van the idea that telephones should be banned in the earlier parts of the story. (Remember that telephones were banned on account of something called "the L disaster." It's now becoming quite clear what that "L" probably stands for.)

"No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed him: 'Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?' asked Lucette. 'Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),' answered Van." (491) -- seems like a crucial moment, perhaps the seed of the many earlier descriptions of Van and Ada's unique similarity, symmetry, etc. This shameful statement can perhaps be vindicated if Van is somehow always not alone, because of the very existence of his double/twin/soul mate.

"Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne" (493) -- Darkbloom: "Sunday. Lunch on thé grass. Everybody sticks. My mother-in-law swallows her dentures. Her little bitch, etc. After which, etc. (see p. 375, a painter's diary Lucette has been reading)" [my copy says 375, which by our pagination here should be around 479-80, but I'm not sure if that's right?]

"Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet" (493) -- "Violet" appears to be Van's typist. Their interactions have been typed verbatim in this passage -- why?

"As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude." (494) -- good sentence; cf. Van's "I'm not alone." Interesting and unnerving that Van has made up the experiences related here, since he can't possibly know Lucette's actual final thoughts.

"She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook" (494) -- reference to the brook scene in Part 1 Ch. 23. Of course the doll swept away by the current foreshadows the means of Lucette's death. Boyd, who seems to have taken that "unanalyzable" as a challenge, devotes much of The Place of Consciousness to the doll scene and its echoes.

"As a psychologist, I know the unsoundness of speculations as to whether Ophelia would not have drowned herself after all, without the help of a treacherous sliver, even if she had married her Voltemand." (497) -- the replacement of Hamlet by Voltemand (an ambassador and very minor character in Hamlet) is a reference to Van's use of Voltemand as a pseudonym.

"In other more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck, there might exist restraints, principles, transcendental consolations, and even a certain pride in making happy someone one does not really love; but on this planet Lucettes are doomed." (498) -- important for the Terra/Antiterra divide.

"Cher ami [etc.]" (499) -- the Darkbloom notes translate Cordula's entire letter (which is in French -- why?): "Dear friend, my husband and I, were deeply upset by the frightful news. It was to me - and this I'll always remember - that practically on the eve of her death the poor girl addressed herself to arrange things on the Tobakoff, which is always crowded and which from now on I'll never take again, slightly out of superstition and very much out of sympathy for gentle, tender Lucette. I had been so happy to do all I could, as somebody had told me that you would be there too. Actually, she said so herself; she seemed so joyful to spend a few days on the upper deck with her dear cousin! The psychology of suicide is a mystery that no scientist can explain. I have never shed so many tears, it almost makes me drop my pen. We return to Malbrook around mid-August. Yours ever." There is a very Nabokovian twist to the statement "the psychology of suicide is a mystery that no scientist can explain" -- it sounds like a banal commonplace at first, but in fact Van's inability to foresee Lucette's suicide is a major source of shame.

"[This letter] would not have been written at all if your last line, your cry of unhappiness, were not my cry of triumph." (500) -- the "last line" in question is "I cannot express, dear Van, how unhappy I am, the more so as we never learned in the arbors of Ardis that such unhappiness could exist." Why is this a "triumph" for Van? Simply because it is a restatement of the supposed Edenic innocence of Ardis?

"Artistically, and ardisiacally, the best moment is one of the last" (500) -- cf. the much more opaque "esthetically, ecstatically, Estotially speaking" (30).

"And o’er the summits of the Tacit / He, banned from Paradise, flew on: / Beneath him, like a brilliant’s facet, / Mount Peck with snows eternal shone." (502) -- Darkbloom: "parody of four lines in Lermontov's The Demon."

No clue what to make of the strange "Andrey Vaynlender" letter.

"Mont Roux" (508) -- a version of Montreux, the region of Switzerland where Nabokov lived while writing this novel. "Roux" means red, so this might be a Lucette reference?

"Vrubel’s wonderful picture of Father, those demented diamonds staring at me, painted into me." (509) -- refers to Vrubel's paintings of the titular figure from Lermontov's poem "Demon." (See e.g. "Demon Seated in a Garden.".) "Demented" resonates with the early identification of "Demon" as "a form of Demian or Dementius" (4).

"and on the opposite shore of Leman, Leman meaning Lover, loomed the crest of Sex (Scex) Noir, Black Rock." (509) -- cf. the first sentence of Part 1 Ch. 3: "The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of 'Terra,' are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans -- and not to grave men or gravemen." (17)

"A dead and dry hummingbird moth lay on the window ledge of the lavatory. Thank goodness, symbols did not exist either in dreams or in the life in between." (510) -- cf. "You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!" (530)

"His reply was inept, and the whole episode had a faint paramnesic tang—and next instant Van was shot dead from behind (such things happen, some tourists are very unbalanced) and stepped into his next phase of existence." (510) -- what the fuck? Perhaps Van is simply contending, in jest, that another meeting with Ada could not happen except in heaven and thus that he must be dead. But this is also another intimation of unreality, or potential reality, like the mention of "life forking" at the end of Part 2 and at the end of this chapter.

"cygneous" (511) -- "curved like the neck of a swan." Cf. Lucette's "struthious" dress.

"As Andrey’s crumpled forlorn face came closer, one could distinguish various wartlets and lumps, none of them, however, placed in the one-sided jaunty position of his kid sister’s naric codicil." (513) -- "naric": "of or relating to the nares [the pair of openings of the nose or nasal cavity]." So a "naric codicil" would be a sort of "supplement" to the nasal openings.

"During that dismal dinner (enlivened only by the sharlott and five bottles of Moët, out of which Van consumed more than three) he avoided looking at that part of Ada which is called “the face”—a vivid, divine, mysteriously shocking part, which, in that essential form, is rarely met with among human beings (pasty and warty marks do not count)." (516) -- good sentence.

"(A pause.)" (517) -- Darkbloom: "This and the whole conversation parody Chekhov's mannerisms."

"in my works, I try not to ‘explain’ anything, I merely describe." (519) -- perhaps applicable to Ada itself, Van's final "work."

"and then he pounced upon her new, young, divine, Japanese neck which he had been coveting like a veritable Jupiter Olorinus throughout the evening." (520) -- Darkbloom: "Olorinus: from Lat. olor, swan (Leda's lover)."

"Somebody said, wheeling a table nearby: “It’s one of the Vane sisters,” and he awoke murmuring with professional appreciation the oneiric word-play combining his name and surname" (521) -- reference to "The Vane Sisters," a famous Nabokov story in which the first letters of the words in the final paragraph carry an acrostic message from the beyond.

"Rufomonticulus" (522) -- presumably the Latin name of Mont Roux.

"Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon." (523) -- cool sentence.

" 'Ne ricane pas!' exclaimed Ada. 'The poor, poor little man! How dare you sneer?' " (530) -- this whole exchange, though presented as a kind of tragic culmination of Van-Ada exchanges (e.g. with the recapitulation of the "Qui me rendra" stuff), seems oddly out-of-character: Van's lines are self-parodically Romantic while Ada's are unusually simple and banal.

"As had been peculiar to his nature even in the days of his youth, Van was apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell." (530) -- good sentence!

" 'Castle True, Castle Bright!' he now cried, 'Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!' " (531) -- the Tree might be the Shattal Tree, or perhaps the tree that Ada stands with her back to in Part 1 Ch. 39 (p. 272), and which later forms an integral part of the agonizing image of her that Van carries away with him when he leaves Ardis in 1888. The Moth could be one of the various moths Ada enthuses about at Ardis in 1884, or the dead moth mentioned earlier in this chapter?

"Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet" (530) -- V&A's two summers in Ardis (1884 and 1888), their time in Manhattan, and now their rendezvous in Mont Roux.

"Ach, perestagne!" (530) -- intentionally or not, this provides a new variant: "Ach, perestagne" replaces "Et ma montagne" (138).

"Life forked and reforked." (531) -- this again.

11. And Much, Much More (Part 4 to Part 5, Chapter 6)

GENERAL REMARKS (Part 4 to Part 5, Ch. 6)

If Van Veen were to record a hip-hop album -- under the name "Mascodegama," of course -- it would be titled "The Texture of Rhyme." Possible subject matter: being the youngest Venutian, blinding Kim Beauharnais, the important difference between his own sick flow and the non-passage of Pure Time . . .

So now we've come to the end. There is all kinds of weird stuff going on Part 4 and Part 5. First we have Van's philosophical treatise (which espouses views very close to Nabokov's own and seems to have been intended as an attempt at serious philosophical writing, however silly much of it may strike me and various other readers). Then we have Part 6: a bizarre, at times rapturous but just as often petty and underwhelming account of Van and Ada's last years together.

What should we make of the fact that, faced with decades of romantic satisfaction to describe, Van tells us about the bodily annoyances of old age and the charms of his cute typist (and the "gipsy girl" next door)? Is he simply asserting that his and Ada's connection is ineffable, mystical, impossible to explain to non-Vaniadans? (Whereof Van cannot speak, thereof he must be silent? Ada's final line in Part 4 supports this interpretation, if we take the entirety of Part 5 to be the completion of her sentence "It is like -- ": Vaniadan experience is as ineffable as Time.) Or is Van giving up, pencilling in the very crudest sketch of a "happily ever after" ending that he knows is totally unconvincing? His suggestion that he has regained the earliest days of Ardis -- "Their life together responded antiphonally to their first summer in 1884" (574) -- is belied by the formal design of the novel, as Part 5 is the shortest of the Parts, the most sparing with detail. Time's arrow remains undefeated. How can he be so vague when describing recent months when he was so fantastically precise about stuff that happened when he was 14? Is this how memory really works? Surely not.

We are adrift. What on (anti-)earth did we just read? The hilarious ending, in which Van (?) imagines a blurb that sells Ada as a work of grand entertainment, simply underscores how far we are from anything resembling an ordinary novel. The text seems to be Van's attempt to squeeze his life story into the novel format (specifically, into the form of a big, dramatic Russian classic like Anna Karenina). There are numerous indications that he is willing to go to great lengths of invention. It is pretty much impossible to take the story straight; it continually pokes and prods the reader with its own implausibility, instability, inconsistency ("Abraham Milton / Milton Abraham / Lincoln"). In some tricky novels there is a clear "standard model" from which one can defiantly deviate (e.g., in Pale Fire, the various "Shade invented Kinbote or vice versa" theories are replacements for the basic interpretation of the book that any ordinary reader comes to, in which S and K are real, distinct people). Ada, by contrast, has no stable top layer -- and perhaps no bottom. As readers we have to figure out what in Van's story is real and what is invented. But to do so, we must speculate about the psychology of the "real Van" -- and that psychology will depend on our opinions about what is real and what is invented!

An ideal start for someone contemplating these problems is David Auerbach's blog post "Kinbote Triumphant in Hell: The Riddle of Nabokov’s Ada." It's where I've gotten a lot of my own ideas about the book, like the significance of Lucette's last call. I'll just quote a few paragraphs here:

I won’t attempt to figure out precisely what is real and what is not in the book because I don’t think I stand much of a chance, but I will make some broad guesses. I am inclined to be extremely skeptical of the mostly unchronicled decades of happiness with Ada, as well as of the success of Van’s book. The happier the events, the more dubious I am. The tragic events–Lucette’s death being the central one–most likely hold greater reality. Ada’s intrusions throughout, but especially at the end of the book, seem more likely to be a voice within Van, not an actual person. I think it highly unlikely that Van and Ada are ever happily reunited. Nabokov did not intend to redeem Van Veen through suffering, but particularly in the later novels, Nabokov’s rotten characters do tend to be spared any real happiness. I strongly suspect that to be the case here. The idyllic, hermetic, and very long Part 1 is a pastiche or a parody of the 19th century Russian novel. Inverting Tolstoy’s maxim turns it into a joke. Hence from the beginning Van is protecting himself and not being straight, and the offputting nature of the whole text is a reflection of Van’s solipsism. He is building a sealed coffin for himself that he intends no one to penetrate. He will avoid unpleasantness as much as possible, even at the cost of making himself unpleasant. With each subsequent section things get more miserable, the length gets shorter, and different strategies of avoidance are invoked. The late years of happiness with Ada are more likely years of self-torture, any success in love or life a delusion on Van’s part. By Part 4, he has abandoned plot in favor of mere allusions to wish-fulfillment and philosophical self-indulgence. At his supposed happiest he is least able to describe anything that happened to him.

(Auerbach ends up speculating that the text might actually have been written by Andrey Vinelander, which strikes me as almost uniquely unlikely . . . )

Ada is my favorite Nabokov novel, and probably tied for my favorite novel overall. In the end, it's one of the darkest and creepiest novels I've ever read, precisely because of the bottomlessness of its potential horror. Other books tell us about nasty characters and nasty situations; this one merely shows us a bunch of fanciful wishful thinking and leaves us to guess the real situation from which it is as escape (with plenty of suggestive references to hell, in case we need some general pointers). It is a closed system, standing securely upon its own head, self-contained, self-referential, self-possessed. There is a risk in this. The book is purely itself, and Van is purely himself, from the first page to the last. It does not provide a convenient ledge on which the author and reader can congregate and snicker at the far-off characters. It's written in third person (because that's how Van wrote it); there is no voice there untouched by Van's, no world untainted by Antiterra. As Auerbach puts it:

. . . we don’t see anything pushing back against Van Veen. All opposing forces tend to dissolve away sooner or later. The marshaling of fantasy to defy reality becomes a structuring principle of the book even to the point of alienating readers from it, lest they crack open Van’s coffin and discover his secrets. Where there is little reality, there is little sympathy to be had, hence the uninvolving nature of so many of the characters, not least Van himself. While Van puts up a good front to a point, ultimately he knows he’s not fooling anyone with his “happy family chronicle.” What starts off in Part 5 as the joyous introduction ends with solipsistic torment in a self-fashioned hell. And what better analogy for a solipsistic world than incest?

Or, as Martin Amis puts it, under the impression that he is criticizing the book rather than pointing out one of its design features:

And then, too, with Ada, there is something altogether alien – a sense of monstrous entitlement, of unbridled, head-in-air seigneurism. Morally, this is the world for which the twisted Humbert thirsts: a world where "nothing matters", and "everything is allowed".

But I love the closed system of Ada because it feels real, in the sense that it feels psychologically authentic. People really do create great systems of private associations like this; people really do neurotically rearrange and sanitize their memories like this. We all have it within us to fetishize the past like this, to take a few key moments and make of them an Ardis that exerts a grotesque influence on our lives -- one which ends up having less and less to do with real arbors or Adas. And when we do this it is not simple or straightforward; it is not pleasant to read about; it is the kind of convoluted, obsessive, opaque, obscure personal mythology that Auerbach calls "uninviting" and that we find all throughout Ada.

And of course the book is gorgeously written -- in a way that is often obscure but never feels obscurantist. I remember one reviewer saying that they enjoyed every sentence in Ada, even the ones they didn't understand; this seems to apply more generally to every aspect of the book. Even when I have no clue what he's doing, I never feel like Nabokov is just trying to fuck with me. Every element of the closed system is authentic, on the unique terms of that system.

The final words of the book are a characteristically brilliant flourish: Nabokov finishes off his hilarious parody of ad copy by repurposing an advertising cliche -- "and much, much more" -- so as to lend it a new meaning that is stunning, moving, and even terrifying in a sort of Lovecraft way. How many strange and unsettling details this book contains! How many the reader must undoubtedly have missed! (The blurb encourages the reader to go back and re-read.) This book teems. "And much, much more" -- too much! Too much!

To remind us that there's always (much, much) more to discover, I'll let the master have the final word -- and in the process claim "loathed" Van Veen as one of his "favorites" (?):

I wonder if there is really so much doom and "frustration" in my fiction? Humbert is frustrated, that’s obvious; some of my other villains are frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent characters -- in The Gift, in Invitation to a Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera– are victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel -- and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.

(Nabokov, interviewed for Bayerischer Rundfunk, 1971)

(Okay, okay. One last thing from me. The book opens with the following note: "With the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Oranger, a few incidental figures, and some non-American citizens, all the persons mentioned by name in this book are dead. [Ed.]" Who are these "non-American citizens"? The phrasing seems to imply that they are not "incidental figures," yet I can't think of any characters of any importance, besides the Orangers, who might have outlived the Veens.)

NOTES

"novo-sapiens" (536) -- seems like it should be "novus-sapiens," but I guess Nabokov/Van wanted the similarity in sound.

"Man, in that sense, will never die, because there may never be a taxonomical point in his evolutionary progress that could be determined as the last stage of man in the cline turning him into Neohomo, or some horrible, throbbing slime." (536) -- reminiscent of the speculations about quasi-mystical future forms of mankind that were popular in science fiction at the time (e.g. in Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End").

"One can be a lover of Space and its possibilities: take, for example, speed, the smoothness and sword-swish of speed; the aquiline glory of ruling velocity; the joy cry of the curve; and one can be an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration. I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum." (537) -- nice passage.

"Aurelius Augustinus" (537) -- Saint Augustine, whose discussions of the conscious experience of time are similar to Van's.

"The direction of Time, the ardis of Time, one-way Time, here is something that looks useful to me one moment, but dwindles the next to the level of an illusion obscurely related to the mysteries of growth and gravitation." (538) -- and yet the directionality of time has been one of the main themes of the whole book. Van gives up the game when he uses the word "ardis." Maybe he doesn't intend irreversibility to fall within the scope of this treatise, but when that treatise is written as an account of his journey toward his final and lasting reunion with Ada, surely irreversibility can't be truly irrelevant . . . ?

"The irreversibility of Time (which is not heading anywhere in the first place) is a very parochial affair: had our organs and orgitrons not been asymmetrical, our view of Time might have been amphitheatric and altogether grand, like ragged night and jagged mountains around a small, twinkling, satisfied hamlet." (538-9) -- or, in cross-section, something like a "V" shape.

"But beware, anime meus, of the marcel wave of fashionable art; avoid the Proustian bed and the assassin pun (itself a suicide -- as those who know their Verlaine will note)." (540) -- a flurry of spurious references (Augustine, Proust, Procrustes, Verlaine) that seems intended to warn by example: puns and allusions will get you nowhere in this business, no matter how fun they are. Darkbloom: "assassin pun: a pun on pointe assassine (from a poem by Verlaine)."

"We, poor Spatians, are better adapted, in our three-dimensional Lacrimaval" (541) -- for "Lacrimaval" Google only turns up full text versions of Ada. Presumably it's a version of "Vale of Tears."

" 'Space is a swarming in the eyes, and Time a singing in the ears,' says John Shade, a modern poet, as quoted by an invented philosopher ('Martin Gardiner') in The Ambidextrous Universe, page 165." (542) -- an Antiterran reversal of the real fact that, on Terra, Martin Gardner (not "Gardiner" as in the text) quoted John Shade in his book The Ambidextrous Universe. The appearance of John Shade (invented poet from Pale Fire) as a real person in Antiterra is Nabokovian fan service along the same lines as Professor Pnin's cameo appearance at at the university in Pale Fire.

"Minkowski" (542) -- mathematician who contributed to special relativity and first introduced the modern/relativistic version of four-dimensional space-time.

"At this point, I suspect, I should say something about my attitude to 'Relativity.' It is not sympathetic. What many cosmogonists tend to accept as an objective truth is really the flaw inherent in mathematics which parades as truth." (543) -- astonishingly, Nabokov himself actually believed this. ("While not having much physics, I reject Einstein's slick formulae; but then one need not know theology to be an atheist." [1968 BBC interview]) Since he loved mimicry and other trickery in biology, it's surprising that he didn't see the same appeal in the way that the strangeness of relativistic space-time hides behind a nicely intuitive Newtonian veil until one gets close to light speed.

"Alice in the Camera Obscura" (547) -- seems to be a mixture of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Camera Obscura," the original title of the Nabokov novel usually called "Laughter in the Dark." Also an allusion to Kim taking pictures of Ada? Another example of shifting Antiterran names, since on p. 53 the Antiterran equivalent of Carroll's book was "Palace in Wonderland." (See also "Ada in Wonderland" [127], "Ada's Adventures in Adaland" [568] -- which leads us to conclude that Van is working from something like the actual earthly title, since where else could he have gotten that "Adventures" from?)

"Dr. Froid of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu" (549) -- compare to this from Ch. 3: "A Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaurs, who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes" (27).

"Now blows the wind of the Present at the top of the Past -- at the top of the passes I have been proud to reach in my life, the Umbrail, the Fluela, the Furka, of my clearest consciousness!" (549) -- as one might expect from context, these are all passes in Switzerland.

"Here they are, the two rocky ruin-crowned hills that I have retained for seventeen years in my mind with decalcomaniac romantic vividness" (551) -- "Decalcomania, from the French décalcomanie, is a decorative technique by which engravings and prints may be transferred to pottery or other materials. Today the shortened version is 'Decal'. " (Wikipedia)

"He transmitted by the new 'instantogram,' flashed to the Geneva airport, a message ending in the last word of her 1905 cable" (552) -- unless I'm missing something, the word is "rainbows"? (508)

"Now it so happened that she had never -- never, at least, in adult life -- spoken to him by phone; hence the phone had preserved the very essence, the bright vibration, of her vocal cords, the little 'leap' in her larynx, the laugh clinging to the contour of the phrase, as if afraid in girlish glee to slip off the quick words it rode." (555) -- another significant telephone call, and another possible source for the banning of telephones -- although this one isn't connected with the "L disaster" in any way I can discern, and the psychological motivation for inventing a ban on telephones would be less clear here.

"lucubratiuncula" (559) -- "The act of working by night; lucubration, nocturnal study, night work." (Wiktionary). Apparently it's a diminutive of another Latin word meaning the same thing? "A little night work"?

" 'To be' means to know one 'has been.' 'Not to be' implies the only 'new' kind of (sham) time: the future. I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries, have no future." (559) -- more Hamlet. Also, I wonder what Van's denial of the existence of the future (expressed here and earlier) has to do with the themes of the novel? Perhaps nothing: at various points in Parts 4 (like the irreversibility comments mentioned above), Van dismisses as irrelevant certain issues that are very relevant to the novel's story, as though Nabokov is trying to tell us that we're supposed to read this as an actual, serious philosophical treatise rather than a thinly veiled expression of personal anxieties. But then it's hard not to deem it significant that these thoughts about the future come right after Ada's departure . . .

"But the future remains aloof from our fancies and feelings. At every moment it is an infinity of branching possibilities." (560-1) -- more of the "forking" motif, though it's not clear to me what this claim has to do with Van's deadpan (though presumably? non-literal) descriptions of branching possibilities earlier in the book.

" 'I told him to turn,' she said, 'somewhere near Morzhey ('morses' or 'walruses,' a Russian pun on 'Morges' -- maybe a mermaid’s message). And you slept, you could sleep!' " (562) -- Darkbloom, uncharacteristically, points out something that should already be clear: "mermaid: allusion to Lucette." Boyd, in The Place of Consciousness, goes wild with this idea and claims that Lucette, acting from beyond the grave, actually told Ada to turn back. He would later espouse an analogous theory of Pale Fire. Yes, according to Brian Boyd that is the secret of both these books: when women commit suicide they come back as ghosts who send the protagonists helpful messages. I'm sorry, but I don't exactly find this kind of thing adds much to the books . . .

"My aim was to compose a kind of novella in the form of a treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors gradually increasing, very gradually building up a logical love story, going from past to present, blossoming as a concrete story, and just as gradually reversing analogies and disintegrating again into bland abstraction." (563) -- I might be reckoning this wrong, but my impression is that Part 4 begins the process of "disintegrating again into bland abstraction" after Ada leaves, and the only thing that prevents Van's original plan from running to completion is the eucatastrophic final reunion.

"I wonder if the attempt to discover those things is worth the stained glass. We can know the time, we can know a time. We can never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to perceive it. It is like -- " (563) -- what is the significance of this? Is Ada completing the "reversal of analogies" by supplying her own analogy, hence completing Van's original plan after all (and thus reconfirming the fundamental unity between Van and Ada)? Is Nabokov inviting us to consider the whole of the following Part 5 as an account of something unknowable? ("It is like [Part 5]"? Or perhaps "it is like [the many years skipped between Parts 4 and 5]"?) IIRC, Look At The Harlequins! ends, with a dash, in the middle of a sentence of dialogue; I wonder if the same is true of some of the Nabokov novels or stories I haven't read.

"This Part Five is not meant as an epilogue; it is the true introduction of my ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle." (567) -- interesting choice of proportions. Note how the notion of Part 5 as the "true introduction" works as an instance of the time-reversal motif, and also as a nod to Nabokov's idea that books can only be truly appreciated upon re-reading. Having reached the final Part of Ada or Ardor, the reader is finally ready to be "introduced" to it.

" 'matches the highest forms of human thought—pure mathematics & decipherment' (unpublished ad)." (567) -- though diminished by that "(unpublished ad)," this is an uncharacteristically -- and pleasingly -- positive reference to the pleasures of mathematics, about which Nabokov otherwise had little good to say.

"a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water that was sure to release three or four belches as big as the speech balloons in the “funnies” of his boyhood" (570) -- perhaps meant to recall "the Sunday supplement of a newspaper that had just begun to feature on its funnies page the now long defunct Goodnight Kids, Nicky and Pimpernella (sweet siblings who shared a narrow bed)" (5-6). There are a number of references in Part 5 to the very early sections of the book. The beginning and the end are one: the tips of the "V" or "A."

"the bedside light (a gurgling new surrogate -- real lammer having been forbidden again by 1930)" (572) -- another callback to the beginning: " the extremely elaborate and still very expensive hydrodynamic telephones and miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach'im (Russian 'to the devil') with the banning of an unmentionable "lammer." (There Darkbloom glosses "lammer" as "allusion to electricity.") The re-banning of electricity is produces an A-D-A. (And now that the two significant telephones calls had passed, what purpose could it serve on Antiterra / in Van's story?)

"Their life together responded antiphonally to their first summer in 1884" (574) -- confirms what had been implicitly made clear.

"An overwhelming tenderness impelled him to kneel suddenly at her feet in dramatic yet utterly sincere attitudes, puzzling to anyone who might enter with a vacuum cleaner." (574) -- another instance of overly romantic corniness. These seem to cluster near the end of the book; it's hard to imagine young Van doing anything like this, even in his imagination.

"She was (and still is -- ten years later) an enchanting English blonde with doll eyes, a velvet carnation and a tweed-cupped little rump […..]" (576) -- it's not clear to me whether the editor has omitted something or is merely expressing, through indicated silence, his offense at this comment about his wife.

"she had supported for ten years her mother’s children from two marriages, besides laying aside [something]" (576) -- but apparently Ronald Oranger doesn't want us to know what. (What does this mean? Am I just being dense?)

"this strange, friendless, rather repulsive nonagenarian (cries of “no, no!” in lectorial, sororial, editorial brackets)." (577) -- strange: who did write this? And hasn't it been quite a long time since we saw a note from Ada? (If I'm not mistaken it was back in Part 2 Ch. 2, p. 338, about Letters From Terra: "I disagree, it’s a nice, nice little book! Ada’s note.")

"one of his last papers (1959) entitled The Farce of Group Therapy in Sexual Maladjustment" (577) -- a joke about the threesome scene.

"Ada, who amused herself by translating . . . John Shade into Russian and French" (577) -- John Shade on Antiterra again.

"E, p, i -- why 'y,' my dear?" (578) -- Darkbloom explains that this is Violet trying to spell the word "epistemic," which occurs earlier on this page.

"That work [The Texture of Time], she said, always reminded her, in some odd, delicate way, of the sun-and-shade games she used to play as a child in the secluded avenues of Ardis Park." (579) -- another callback to the beginning. Suggests that a certain appreciation for the subtle "texture" of conscious experience is a key part of V&A's connection to one another. (Remember Ada's towers/bridges system?)

"They found the historical background absurdly farfetched and considered starting legal proceedings against Vitry—not for having stolen the L.F.T. idea, but for having distorted Terrestrial politics as obtained by Van with such diligence and skill from extrasensorial sources and manic dreams." (581) -- and yet the account of earth history given here is much more accurate than the one that Van gives in LFT (described in Part 2 Ch. 2).

"in a flashback to a revolution in former France, an unfortunate extra, who played one of the under-executioners, got accidentally decapitated while pulling the comedian Steller, who played a reluctant king, into a guillotinable position" (581) -- this death, along with the scope of the project ("some said more than a million, others, half a million men and as many mirrors") link the LFT film with the real-life film Ben Hur.

"From the tremendous correspondence that piled up on Van’s desk during a few years of world fame, one gathered that thousands of more or less unbalanced people believed (so striking was the visual impact of the Vitry-Veen film) in the secret Government-concealed identity of Terra and Antiterra. Demonian reality dwindled to a casual illusion. Actually, we had passed through all that. Politicians, dubbed Old Felt and Uncle Joe in forgotten comics, had really existed. Tropical countries meant, not only Wild Nature Reserves but famine, and death, and ignorance, and shamans, and agents from distant Atomsk. Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages ago -- they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary. Even the governor of France was not Charlie Chose, the suave nephew of Lord Goal, but a bad-tempered French general." (582) -- I'm sure CML would take me to task if I didn't point out that this is reminiscent of the Borges story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." It's also a huge moment of instability, and perhaps the most frustrating instance of the ambiguity between literal and figurative in Van's style (e.g. Demon's wings, forking time). Is Van merely saying that the dreams of Terra were surprisingly prophetic, and that Antiterra as of the 1960s is surprisingly similar to the Terra envisioned by patients in the late 19th century? Or is he simply giving up the whole game and declaring, with infuriating insouciance, that the whole story took place in the real world after all? (Incidentally, the period on Terra corresponding to V&A's last years on Antiterra would be . . . the 2010s, i.e., now. To channel C again: "Far out, man, far fuckin' out.")

"Recorded and replayed in their joint memory was their early preoccupation with the strange idea of death. . . . The strange mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous scenes. Hard but not insurmountable (I can do anything, I can tango and tap-dance on my fantastic hands)." (583-4) -- the presence of the concept of death even in the earliest parts of the book is here confirmed. (Compare to Van's attempt to disclaim this side of the story: "a book addressed to young laymen and lemans -- and not to grave men or gravemen" [17]).

" 'As lovers and siblings,' she cried, 'we have a double chance of being together in eternity, in terrarity' " (583) -- cf. this from p. 158: "I shall never love anybody in my life as I adore you, never and nowhere, neither in eternity, nor in terrenity, neither in Ladore, nor on Terra, where they say our souls go." "Terrenity" (unlike "terrarity") is a real word, meaning "Earthiness; worldliness."

"And I knew a girl called Adora, little thing in my last floramor. What makes me see that bit as the purest sanglot in the book?" (584) -- perhaps the fact that that scene was the first one Nabokov came up with for the book, as he revealed in an interview.

"And finally, there is the featureless pseudo-future, blank and black, an everlasting nonlastingness, the crowning paradox of our boxed brain’s eschatologies!" (585) -- good sentence!

"And if you land then on Terra Caelestis" (585) -- "caelestis" means "heavenly" or "celestial" in Latin. May be a reference to "Harmonia Caelestis" ("a cycle of 55 sacred cantatas attributed to the Hungarian composer Paul I, 1st Prince Esterházy of Galántha (1635–1713)" [Wikipedia])?

"She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the right of making up a future, and in that case one’s very own future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years quickly passed—a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern." (585) -- seems like a strong suggestion that Van's happy life with Ada is invented? (But of course Ada is saying this as a 12-year-old, and the "eighty years" here are the whole rest of the story.)

The lines given on p. 585 are indeed lines 569-572 of the poem "Pale Fire" (from the novel Pale Fire). I don't know what non-metrical significance the omission of the "boths" could have (claimed by imagined Freudians on p. 586).

"Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That’s whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything would have been all right -- I would have stayed with you both in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis, instead of all that we teased her to death!" (586) -- what should we make of this acknowledgement? If V&A acknowledge their responsibility in Lucette's death, then why hasn't it had more of a footprint in the book? (Of course, it probably has, just covertly.)

"whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America -- for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams?" (588) -- a possible justification for the invention of Antiterra. Note the double meaning of "principle part" (also a grammatical term) -- part of a motif about how textual/verbal the Ada world is ("old novels," etc).

"Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the 'Ardis' part of the book." (588) -- the reminiscences in question are presumably Tolstoy's "Childhood, Boyhood, Youth." Also, "innocence" is (at least in one sense) a hilarious word to use for the randy Veens.

"That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages." (588) -- I love the awkward, ugly language here: "possesses an aspect prohibited by law."

"Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this delightful book." (588) -- the cloying cliche "tragic fate" seems to mock the intuitively appealing interpretation that Lucette's death is supposed to be the emotional climax of the book. This sentence itself parodies the awkwardness of trying to hawk fictional tragedy as an appealing experience -- "tragic" clashes with "highlights" and "delightful."

"It is interrupted by her marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country." (588) -- more hilariously awkward/platitudinous language.

"They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere." (588) -- the word "villa" and the innuendo in "erected" remind us of a different set of villas, the Villa Venus club.

"Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail" (589) -- you can say that again.

"a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook" (589) -- Lucette's doll lost in the brook again ("the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an unanalyzable brook" [494]).

"and much, much more" (589) -- see above (in every sense!).