I should start by noting that I won David Schmahmann’s The Double Life of Alfred Buber as a Library Thing early reviewer. Usually, I can tell pretty quickly whether I like a book or not, but this was one of those rare cases in which it was not easy to form an opinion. This was, at least in part, because I read the bound galleys, which were in need of some editing. And the publisher’s comparison to Nabokov, which we’ve all seen before, may have on some readers (like myself) the opposite effect: “Oh, no! Another Nabokov?” Having said this, I should also add that it was clear from the beginning the Schmahmann is a serious writer.

The comparison with Lolita is justified by the narrator’s infatuation with a girl twenty years younger than he, and by a certain tone of the confession. But Buber’s Lolita is, of course, a creature of our times: she is a young prostitute in Thailand, and Buber is himself a very introspective, complex intellectual, who constantly analyzes himself and the others. He is, in fact, a Proustian character, a romantic, though an ironic one, of course. What saves Schmahmann’s novel from being a cheap thrill or a poor pastiche of Nabokov is the fact that his narrator is truly interesting (and I am using this word in its deepest sense); he has a mind and sensibility that stay with you long after you finish the novel. I am a reader who is interested more than anything in the author’s mind and sensibility, and Buber’s creator seems to me at least as intriguing as Buber. The novel has many paragraphs that are stylistically beautiful and it is, generally, intellectually engaging.