Interesting about your other doublets. I forgot to mention Shakespeare’s obvious play within the play. Too many to string together, if one would try to play the meta game between new fiction and criticism on top of the original works. Does Nabokov’s fire pale in comparison with the master? And who wears the mantle of Nabokov today?

Thanks for the link to the review. Definitely want to read his posthumous novel.

On another topic:

Did you hear that Sotheby’s is auctioning off Breton’s manifesto? Now he would certainly find that surreal.

Ophelia was on my mind this week, by way of Nabokov: Ron Rosenberg had seized upon Hamlet’s father’s ghost as the trope for Dmitri’s difficult decision on the fate of The Original of Laura, having previously highlighted it in his review of Brian Boyd’s book on Pale Fire (in which Shade’s daughter shares Ophelia’s fate). One of the loose ends that bothered me was how Word Golf fit into that work (aside from transgendering ‘lass’ to ‘male’ in the Index): a tentative, speculative answer is that it is a restriction on Lewis Carroll’s doublet game, one that does not allow a derangement of letter order. As ‘bodkin’ refers to the famous soliloquy (prior to direct colloquy between Ham and Oph), so ‘doublet’ appears in Ophelia’s first indirect report on Hamlet’s disorder (“Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced …”). The madness Hamlet feigns, Ophelia would fain fall into — a commentary upon Kinbote, or John & Hazel Shade? Another mystery …