"experts in obscure subjects--paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. "
Also Pattern 10: emphatic appositive at end, after a colon
"I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins."
Also Pattern 7: an internal series of appositives or modifiers
and Pattern 9: repetition of a key term
"I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity--the fatal rigidity--of some of her rules."
Nabokov probably most frequently uses Pattern 7. He descriptions just get better and better, he continues to modify. In this sentence the use of Pattern 9 for the word "rigidity" makes it stand out more to the reader. Usually any use of repetition will stand out to the reader. It is not only "rigidity", it is "fatal rigidity" this simply puts the emphasis on the "rigidity" of the matter.
Since you favor poetry over prose, you may like "poetic" prose writers like VN. Interesting to note that both of the sentences you quoted from VN have a complete sentence structure (S-V-O), then an appositive that isn't really a continuation of the first part but adds more information. It's a slightly "running" quality that gives his sentences a dynamic, unpredictable feel. The Bellow sentences you quoted are cumulative, gaining momentum and adding more information. It is "freer" than VN's shorter constructions.
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