I was reading a brilliant, very funny and sad,
novel by Sergei Gandlevski, <NRZB> ("Illegible"), last night and was struck, with
amusement, by the sentence that ended as follows:
"...listened to Dodik Shapiro's instructive story about his zoologist
acquaintance who had been killed on the spot by the ejaculation of a blue
whale."
The themes of death and sex, and even a sea mammal, are all here, in
this sentence. Only the blue whale has been substituted, by the genius of
coincidence, for our friend walrus. Zabavno!
One feels the influence of VN, especially of Pale Fire, although
it is Clair Quilty, not Kinbote, who is mentioned at one point.
Alexey