Mnemosyne is selective, whimsical, distortive but, fortunately, it can often be accurate (I’m thinking of Brian Boyd’s stupendous memory now). After I followed his indication of the Saturday Review of the Arts, I had the opportunity to read how other writers evaluated or appreciated or criticized VN’s works in 1973. A sentence by William H. Gass struck me in particular for, excepting the posthumously published ToOL, I couldn’t recollect any other novel in which there was a death resulting from “removal by eraser”. And yet, this is one of the options that I encountered in his report.
How could W.H.Gass describe Philip Wild’s obliteration before 1974, before 1977?  There must be a recurring death like his in another story, even more erasures but…where? The author mentions “VN’s latest…” and Transparent Things (1972) inspired the title of his article. A pencil has his story told, but there are no erasers in view, I think. Help!

“Mv memory of Speak, Memory entitles me to see a resemblance between it and the hole that opens just inside his latest .. . to see, in fact, that it composes an elaborate intertext, not onlv for the great N's books themselves but for selected others. Transparent Things, indeed. Aquaria with impenetrable glass sides. Death bv drowning, in Nabokov, is a common contemplation. Strangulations, dream deaths of several kinds, including removal by eraser: these are frequent. Even those who die in fires die first of asphyxiation.”

1973 - Saturday Review of the Arts

·  Upright Among Staring Fish

 by William H. Gass

, p. 35 - PDF