That's that element of violence that keeps coming back, the trail of slime across this dream of transforming reality, in this Joycean way, into something saved, the dream of turning fate, the fate of a dead mother--or, in Nabokov's own case, a father killed by assassination, a brother killed in a concentration camp--turning that into this beautifully worked out, playful system, defined by puns, and images, and a spell of rhetoric. 