Sublime

eponymous

He was smiling now as he greeted his wife and turned to me, and the smile lit his face attractively. There was no earthly reason why I should feel suddenly nervous, or why I should imagine that Héloise de Valmy’s voice as she introduced us was too taut and high, like an over-tight string. I thought, watching her, she’s afraid of him … Then I told m

For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination,

She was a vapor that in my imagination continued to burn without a wick.

that girl, transmuted by bereavement, had gone. And, as far as Juliet could tell, she had never really come back.

The cause is given curtly, mid-sentence: ‘(picnic, lightning)’ and, after a paragraph of tender analogies about his dim recollections of her, she is never mentioned again. This bracketed tragedy is an instant shorthand for Humbert’s sensibility: his ruthless irony and black humour, a flippancy whose source is an inscrutable mix of callousness and p