Kevin Myers (in "There are many elliptical delights in the extraordinary 'Lolita' despite its darkness"
Tuesday August 14 2012, On Line, The Independent) writes: "Finer and more literary minds than mine would no doubt draw the parallel to the odyssey through Dublin on Bloomsday, but we can be in no doubt that the parallel is apt: J'ai toujours admiré l'oeuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois, remarks Humbert at one stage. The sublime Dubliner is of course Joyce, and here it is actually Nabokov who is speaking. Moreover, the word "ormonde" doesn't exist in French; it is a reference to the Ormond Hotel, where the Sirens' episode of Ulysses is set. (And what saves sailors from those fell Lorelei, but the Stella Maris, the starlit sea-shell Venus?)"

Jansy Mello: An interesting expression, related to Nabokov: "elliptical delights"... It provides a wide berth for the most extraordinary digressions, some of them closely followed and firmly grounded in Russian literature by Sklyarenko, or in Shakespeare, as M. Marcus's.

My contribution here is quite humble, but equally ellusive. After learning more about the Roman Venus in connection to the Catholic Virgin Mary (as I indicated in a former posting, as suggestive of what, in ADA, is "a Roman Deity"**), I was struck by another link, now to the "sea-shell Venus," since I'd always been intrigued by a peculiar, unexplained, stress in Pale Fire on "conchology" (shells?).