"Leave me alone. I don't know anything. My son died a few days ago."
The closing line of this story talks on a sad tragic tone that belies its relative simplicity when taken out of context. The story is a love triangle; a one-sided love affair for the title character who is actually a dwarf named Fred Dobson. And though he loves Nora intensely and though they spend a night of passion together, she rejects him in the harshest way possible: by ignoring the fact of his existence.
Gigantic, imperiously reeking of sweat and beer, with beefy voices and senseless speeches, with fecal matter replacing the human brain, they provoke a tremor of ignoble fear.
The description here is of two brothers, Gustav and Anton. Beer-swilling Germans who take it upon themselves to harass the newest lodger, Romatovski. The story was written while Nabokov was in Berlin during the summer. In the year 1933. It is one of the very first pieces of literature to accurately describe the new type of thug who making Germany unsafe for anyone—like Romatovski—whom they considered “different.”
"Referential mania," Herman Brink had called it. In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men.
This is one of Nabokov’s most well known short stories and has intrigued readers for decades. It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma that ends upon a note of ambiguity: a phone ringing for the third time. Many interpretations of the story insist that it actually is written in a kind of code which, when deciphered, pull all the weirdness into place and present a coherent message. Others have concluded that Nabokov was playing a game and that the attempt to coalesce all its mysterious signs and symbols into a meaningful overarching meaning is just another—less psychotic—form of “referential mania.”
I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.
Here is a story about two sisters, Cynthia and Sybil, and a professor who might be termed a ghost investigator. Cynthia is obsessed with acrostics; Sybil commits suicide. The professor references a story in which the first letters of each word in the concluding paragraph spell out a message. In the beginning of the story there is a reference to icicles and another to a parking meter. What is the particular significance of this paragraph? Nothing much. Except that is the concluding paragraph of the story. That’s all. It’s just the concluding paragraph of a story about a sister obsessed with acrostics, ghosts and communicating with the dead. Like her sister. Sybil.
