Daniels applied the Page 69 Test to Cleaning Nabokov's House, her debut novel, and reported the following:This page has some of the threads of my fascination with shame, with tenderness, with the imagined life. It has a representative dancing away from pretension. The relationship between the reader (fictional, the narrator here) and the writer (also fictional, a book by Vladimir Nabokov that is pure invention) is explored on p. 69.Learn more about the book and author at Leslie Daniels's website.
I walked home without knowing it. Nothing looked familiar. I went inside my house and closed the door. I took my clothes off and got in the bathtub and cried. I don’t know why I had to be naked to cry properly, but I did. Then I took a blanket to the couch and read Babe Ruth again.
I tried to read past the story to see what the person who wrote it cared about. It was a shape-shifting kind of book. The writer understood that even in the middle of the most ordinary of happy circumstances, shame and exposure lurked. I wasn’t sure if the writer even believed in love, although there was a lot of love in the book. There were also long twisting paragraphs studded with horror, small shards of horror, like splinters of glass under fingernails.
I thought about Nabokov living here, looking out these same windows, wondering if it was going to rain on him when he walked to teach his class at Waindell. I wondered if Vera handed him the right coat for the weather, or drove with him in their big ’46 Oldsmobile. I wondered if they ever went to a baseball game, and if they did, why?
Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.
--Marshal Zeringue
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