Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Lolita
Sybil was my mother's older rigid sister, who I liked very much despite the fact that she was also in love with my father, and married to my father's cousin, and then served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Aunt Sybil wrote wrote self fufilling poetry about how she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, her pink-rimmed azure eyes would scan the writing as her waxen complexion glistend. Her husband would spent most of his time traveling, espically in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.
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Original passage: My mother's elder sister, Sybil, whom a cousin of my father's had married and then neglected, served in my immediate family as a kind of unpaid governess and housekeeper. Somebody told me later that she had been in love with my father, and that he had lightheartedly taken advantage of it one rainy day and forgotten it by the time the weather cleared. I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity--the fatal rigidity--of some of her rules. Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my father. Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did. Her husband, a great traveler in perfumes, spent most of his time in America, where eventually he founded a firm and acquired a bit of real estate.
ReplyDeleteNice cumulative sentences. Compared to the original, this seems sensible, but it also creates a feeling like someone is telling us something. That's more similar to Bellow, who always feels like a bookish storyteller. That's because the cumulative but not suspensive style seems unpredictable. Compare this to Vonnegut's recently-published "Confido": "Ellen was a fair and tiny woman, in her early 30s, plainly mercurial and bright, though dressed in a dowdy housecoat. In almost any event she would have loved life, but she loved it now with an overwhelming emotion that was like the throbbing amend of a church organ, for she could tell herself this morning that her husband, in addition to being good, would soon be rich and famous." That's cumulative and periodic - it has a punch in the end. But the language is simple - talks to anybody.
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