Cleaning Nabokov's House (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Barbara: Add a description of this character.
• John (aka The Experson)
• Sam: Barbara and John's son
• Darcy: Barbara and John's daughter
• Irene: The social worker involved in Barbara and John's divorce
• Bill Jenkins: Barbara's mailman
• Margie Jenkins: Barbara's agent

Quotes edit see section history

• “Sometimes you can be a productive human being and sometimes you just have to read fiction, even romantic fiction.”

  Barbara

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• It wasn’t that I disliked her, rather that I distrusted her highly flexible relationship with the truth.

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• Going back to New York City once you have stopped living there is like visiting an old lover who has found someone new. Your old love is wearing trendy clothes that seem a little tight but still desperately in fashion. You miss him, and you feel like you know his vices better than she does. But it doesn’t matter, because you are old news.

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• modern linguistic analysis showing that all the place-names in this area are traced to a common root, borrowed from the Seneca tribe that translates roughly to “Pink-face, go home.”

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• narcotic was not lust but the tenderness between people, the love in spite of their unlovableness. Lust is like a robin attacking his reflection in a pane of glass again and again. But tenderness and yearning seeped gently into me, slipping up around me like water. These books seemed to say, We know you, we can take care of you, we have what you want.

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• The shiny flatness and curled edges of the photos reminded me that the past was gone; I had only now to live in and be happy—or not.

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• The middle of life has these cul-de-sac days. In your twenties you think, Surely I am going somewhere, and later—as in now—you think, Nope.

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• They smelled exactly like green walnuts. If you have never smelled a green walnut, it’s the smell that aftershave ought to have but does not.

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• each could lift himself at will above the slog of day-to-day life and see the pattern. Sometimes I could do it too, pull up like a periscope above the crust of the earth and look around. It reminded me that the place where I stood was only one point on the overall map of the world.

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• April is the month when people’s bodies say enough already, like trees whose sap won’t rise again.

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• That was another thing I’d learned about men from the experson: just because you were there sharing a conversation didn’t mean the conversation had anything to do with you.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• New York City
• Oneonta
• Florida
• Paris

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Leslie Daniels (Author)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction