Nabokov’s Lolita & The Art of Styling Sentences

Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt's, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief.

-V. Nabokov, an excerpt from Lolita

Analysis

Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. [Pattern 13; a single modifier out of place for emphasis]

Her parents were old friends of my aunt's, and as stuffy as she.

They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. [Pattern 17, dependent clause as a subject, object, or complement]

Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). [Pattern 5; a series with a balanced pair]

How I loathed them! [Pattern 19; short, simple sentence for dramatic effect]

At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. [Pattern 13; a single modifier out of place for emphasis]

She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. [Pattern 15A; complete inversion of normal pattern/ pattern 7; an internal series of appositives or modifiers]

She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy. [Pattern 1; a compound sentence that makes use of a semicolon instead of a conjunction]

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other [pattern 6; an introductory series of appositives]; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do.