Word: eden
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Vines of Yarrabee, Eden...
...shadows keep falling across the story. Those grandparents of Ellen who purse their lips in disapproval but lend their Michigan lodge for the honeymoon are less comic old folks than vaguely sinister agents provocateurs. Nor is the northwestern shore of Lake Michigan the Garden of Eden it appears to the two children, pretending like every young couple to be the only, the original man and woman on earth. After lyrically celebrating the pleasures of lovemaking, Woiwode begins softly terrorizing paradise. Ghostly presences appear progressively more foreboding: the stuffed animals on the wall, the mice in the piano, night tappings...
...Eden in Rome ("Truly paradisal," says Fielding), their room turned out to be tiny and cramped, overlooking a courtyard that was "like an echo chamber"; at the Athens Hilton (Fielding: "Infinitely the best hostelry in Greece"), the Matisoos had to live with a thermostat that was permanently stuck at 80° and a ghostly toilet that flushed all by itself in the middle of the night. Says Juri: "The manager told us that all the toilets in the hotel were flushing, and there just wasn't anything he could do about it." But Harry's Bar in Florence made...
...Vines of Yarrabee, Eden...
...parallels between Nabokov's experience and his literary creations is viewed by the author with scorn. Yet the soft, pervasive breath of Paradise Lost that whispers through Ada is more than an echo of Everyman's lost ardor. It is a transmogrified version of Nabokov's own lost private Eden in the Russia of his childhood. With his wealthy and gifted family, he lived in a town house in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, and at Vyra, an idyllic, rambling country estate. For Nabokov, his two brothers and two sisters and their parents, life, especially at Vyra, seems to have been...