Jansy Mello:One of the things that always strike me when I read VN's novels lies in his frequent attribution of human qualities and intentions to inanimate objects [ ] I never examined them in detail, but my impression is that this particular form of "personification" is absent from his later, American, novels ( I'm thinking of "Pale Fire" and "Ada")

Mary H. Efremov: ":no, he didn't abandon it...it is in ADA, LOLITA...just read..."

Jansy Mello: You are most probably right. In ADA there's the licentious skirt: "He [Van] remembered with a pang of pleasure the indulgent skirt Ada had been wearing then" and, quite certainly, a thousand other examples will be found. In LOLITA , right at the start, we now get close to another kind of visual-auditory interchange, this time between the body and words: "Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." and to a related image, but totally distinct in body and sound, from "Spring in Fialta": "Occasionally, in the middle of a conversation her name would be mentioned, and she would run down the steps of a chance sentence, without turning her head.".

It will be fun to distinguish each kind of animation personalization, poetic analogy, aso, as it happens in another sentence from the same short-story "because of our sudden draft a wave of muslin embroidered with white dahlias got sucked in, with a shudder and knock, between the responsive halves of the French window, and only when the door had been locked did they let go that curtain with something like a blissful sigh"

Take KQK - & this is only from the first chapter: "The clock face will slowly turn away, full of despair, contempt, boredom, as one by one the iron pillars will start walking past,,," ; "the old chair extended their plush-covered arms with comical cordiality"; "He turned a page, looked around, and the ourside world avidly, like a playful dog waiting for that moment, darted up to him with a bright bound. But pushing Tom away affectionately, Dreyer again immersed himself in his anthology of verse."; "the huge cavity of the station drew in the train, which at once grew sluggish, and then, with a jolt, redundant." ( every sample demands a different rethorical nook).