Jason’s Comments (group member since Aug 31, 2011)

Jason’s comments from the Nabokov in Three Years group.

After rescheduling the final batch of books, starting in November (next month), I realized that the duration here extended an entire year. So, I've subsequently changed the group name from Two Years to Three Years. Just in case anyone cares.

Well, it's been six months, and I still haven't returned to this project. I'm not throwing in the towel just yet, but I do think I'll be skipping over Pale Fire so that I can at least get to the others before too long. Now that I've taken a bit of time away, hopefully, I'll be able to pick things up again.

I know that there are a few folks following this group, and y'all may be wondering just why it's been so quiet here lately.

Despite my motivations and intentions, I did indeed burn out a bit on Nabokov. I finished PNIN back in September 2012, and quite loved it, but have not been able to get back on the wagon again since. I'm currently about halfway through PALE FIRE, although it has taken me six months to get as far as I have, and I'm finding it very difficult to slog through. This surprises me as so many people have cited it as Nabokov's greatest work.

So I've adjusted the reading schedule to account for the fairly sizable gap between the two books, and really sincerely want to finish PALE FIRE this month (April 2013), by hook or by crook. But by doing so, I wonder if this group's title is not completely honest now, since (if I keep to the current schedule), I will have finished all the books in two and a half years, not just two. Does this really matter to anyone besides pedants such as myself?

And has anyone else out there had similar trouble getting through PALE FIRE, or is it just me?

As sweet, sad, and charming as an indie film. I love how tightly focused this novel is on the little things in Timofey Pnin's life, and how much it all reveals about him and endears him to the reader. A wonderful breath of fresh air after the seriousness of Lolita.

And that's all I have to say. :)

Just a note, I'm taking a bit of a break between this book and the next (which is Pale Fire, I believe). This is a very busy time for me, so I'll pick up again in November.

This was a re-read, since Lolita was the very first book that I read by Nabokov, but it was much more fulfilling to read it after having placed the novel within the context of his earlier work. I also realized that in the years since first encountering the novel, there were parts that I'd conflated with The Enchanter, and so it was good to be reminded what was what.

The prose, as before, sings with Humbert Humbert's incredibly mellifluous narrative style. Once again, I found myself reading passages aloud to myself for the pure joy of what Nabokov does with the language. I was seduced once again into the confession of his deplorable and harmful acts, and felt just as uneasy in my voyeuristic complicity.

The biggest difference from that first reading is that I'm now a father of a three-year-old girl. In February 2009, only a month after my daughter's conception, the novel unnerved me, but not nearly as much as it does now. The fact that Lolita is the one to proposition Humbert in that hotel room (at least according to his recount, which must be taken with a whole cupful of salt) does nothing to belie the fact that he rapes a twelve-year-old girl, and then again and again during their cross-country journey, using sex as extortion for all the little things and favors that Lolita wants along the way. I had a measure of this reaction the first time, but on re-reading, it hit far more into my gut, changing the reaction to his actions from intellectual to physical.

This made the novel far darker and tragic for me on this read, and I cheered that much more when Lolita is able to escape Humbert's clutches. I was also far more aware of the unreliability of Humbert's narration, and how he spins certain events to gain sympathy from the reader; one of the ways he does this is by repeatedly putting himself down, referring to himself as an evil monster who deserves to be locked away. His seductive words are always used to this end, to humanize himself, and to beg understanding if not forgiveness. One wonders if he indeed suffered a heart attack (perhaps because of his guilt) while awaiting trial, or whether his death is a result of his confession leading to an untoward action from a jail guard or fellow prisoner.

Interesting that Nabokov lumps this novel together with Invitation to a Beheading (mostly, I gather, because of its invented setting and its tenuous similarity to Kafka-esque absurdism), but Bend Sinister does not sing like its predecessor, it does not push the absurdism enough, it diverges too often from the core narrative with tangential discussions of Hamlet or other unrelated things which, while interesting in their own right, distract. (Also distracting are the occasional intrusions of a first-person voice, who at times seems to be Adam Krug himself, and at others the book's narrator.)

I also found it very difficult at first to empathize with Krug, who is a self-admitted bully, despite, or perhaps because of, his intellectual prowess. He is a philosopher who holds himself above the dictator Paduk (the object of his boyhood bullying) and his other countrymen (and I didn't believe for a second his contemplations of humility). His only saving grace is his love for a deceased wife (who has already died before the first page, although he doesn't seem terribly affected by her death) and his young son. It wasn't until the second half of the book that he in fact began to become a real person (as "real" as a fictional character can be).

It is when the authorities finally come for Krug, after having apprehended all his friends and colleagues, and he is separated from his son that I could not read fast enough, plowing through further absurdity and tragedy until Krug finally loses his grip on reality and plunges backward into the past in that incredibly drafted ending scene, where he and his school chums are about to play an awful prank on the child Paduk, and it shifts back and forth in time fluidly, seamlessly, until it is ended abruptly with the marksman's bullet.

There's a lot going on here for such a slim book, and times it felt a bit unfocused and not totally in control, but ultimately it is a compelling look at a particularly idiotic type of totalitarianism. I just wish that Nabokov, quite cognizant that this was his first English-language novel, hadn't been trying so damn hard.

Next month is a re-read of Lolita, something to which I am thoroughly looking forward.

This novel immediately put me in mind of Orson Welles' brilliant CITIZEN KANE, in that the main character is trying to piece together the life of a great man just after he has died; similarly, the investigation which leads him to lots of different points of view as he interviews several people close to the great man. But the big difference lies in the fact that the narrator of this book, V, knew Sebastian Knight personally, and can fill in many of the gaps in his half-brother's life.

Because of the nature of the narrative, we don't get much about the narrator himself, as he admits that he wants to keep himself out of the text as much as possible. And yet, the passages that linger in the mind the most are those where he was actually present, especially including the final chapters, where he is hunting down Sebastian's mysterious lover, and then rushing to meet his brother at the hospital before he dies. I almost wish that Nabokov had inserted his narrator more often directly into the text because of the vividness of these passages.

I found it interesting that in many cases, Sebastian stood in for Nabokov himself, especially in the feeling that he had lost much of the poetry of the Russian language after switching primarily to English. As this was Nabokov's first book direct written in the English language, this may have been a worry that he had for the future, and indeed it seems to have happened, if his 1967 interview in The Paris Review is any indication.

Also, from the description of Sebastian's novels, I found myself REALLY wanting to read them, and I wonder if Nabokov incorporated any of those plots into his later books; as I move through the rest of his English-language fiction, I guess I'll just have to wait to see if this is the case.

I initially read this book just over a year ago, because of its connection with Lolita (the only other Nabokov book I'd read at that point). It was also my first introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics editions of his work, and would lead to my frantic collection of the remainder of the set.

To correct my impressions of The Gift, THIS was Nabokov's final work in Russian, and what astonishes me upon re-reading it is its context within the man's body of work; The Enchanter and Invitation to a Beheading bookend The Gift, and cannot be more different than that middle selection, both reveling in language and wordplay, both full of intense energy, both remarkable examples of what literary writing can accomplish.

This ur-Lolita should be judged on its own merits, but it is nigh impossible to do so; the shadow of Lolita (the book, not the girl) looms largest over all Nabokov's fiction, and takes many of the plot points from The Enchanter and lets them breathe, lets them happen more naturally. For I cannot help feeling that the story time of The Enchanter just happens too quickly, and ends too abruptly. The Enchanter himself bears a resemblance to Humbert Humbert, but is neither smooth or worldly enough to fulfill his detestable urges. The character of the young girl also feels much more innocent than Delores Haze, as evidenced by her terrified reaction to the Enchanter's bared "magic wand," his "enchanted yardstick" at the novella's climax.

Nabokov's son Dmitri, who brilliantly translated the text into English, is quick to point out in the book's afterword that the novella is the story of lecherous madman, told from his point of view, so as to (I assume) deflect any criticism of the author's morals, and I think that this is why, ultimately, the book can never match up to its bigger brother: the Enchanter never fully enchants the reader. The prose is beautifully written, but I was never seduced by this character as I was by Humbert Humbert.

I am saddened and ashamed to admit that I am unable to complete this book. I have hit a wall at the halfway point and cannot continue. Nabokov's technique of disdaining narrative here has resulted in a slog of text, rarely interspersed with actual story. It is as if, knowing that this would be his last book in Russian, he felt the incredible compulsion to contextualize the entire field of Russian poetry as his farewell paeon to the language.

There were interesting parts to this in the first half, but they are so few and far between, that I see no hope of narrative redemption in the second half. And I am utterly perplexed by those who say it is one of his great novels.

The Gift will lay abandoned on my bookshelf, a failure that I may one day attempt to reconcile, but I'm not holding my breath. There are too many other good books to read. And so I say: onward!

O, what a riotously lovely piece of literature! I realize that Nabokov eschews any kind of Kafkaesque influence, but he and Kafka were clearly drinking from the same narrative well in this case. Our protagonist (with the mellifluous moniker of Cincinnatus C.) knows from the beginning the aspects of falsity and absurdity in the world he both inhabits and feels profoundly apart from. Convicted of the epistemological crime of "gnostical turpitude" (in other words, "depraved knowledge") and sentenced to punitive decapitation, our dear narrator, who seems, on occasion, to psychologically split himself in twain, exists in a state of stultifying stasis, unaware of his execution date or his executioner, until both are revealed toward the end of the book. His reactions to the increasingly bizarre and hermetically implausible events that surround his impending death -- largely consisting of his interactions with his unfaithful profligate of a wife, the prison guard, the warden, Cincinnatus's lawyer, and his neighbor in the next cell -- further illustrate his complete frustration with trying to apply logic in an illogical world, a theme Kafka was also quite fond of exploring.

Nabokov's setting is not entirely invented, as European cities are vaguely referred to, but the citadel-like prison in which Cincinnatus seems to be the only guest feels created from a vague bubble of unreality that only adds to our empathy of his plight. He is occasionally allowed to wander the prison's corridors, but their geometries are in nigh-constant shift, so that one path never leads to the same place twice. The reactions from Rodion (the guard) and Rodrig (the director of the prison) to Cincinnatus's outbursts of emotion are hilarious in the extent to which they take offense, as if he should be thankful and kind to those responsible for his upcoming beheading.

This superb portrait is marred only by the ending, which feels too easy and perfunctory; all along, Cincinnatus has proclaimed that reality is a farce to which he does not belong, as though he has been trapped in a shadow play and forced to exist alongside the puppets. He knows this, deep in his bones, and it is why he was sentenced to death in the book's very first sentence. Yet all he does once on the public execution block is to reflect: "Why am I here? Why am I lying like this?" for his conviction to be proven true; after coming to this simple realization, he truly sees the world for what it is, like Neo in the Matrix, and it all falls apart like a house of cards. It is a logical and elegant conclusion, but again, feels too abrupt, something that might have been remedied had Nabokov spent just a few more paragraphs investigating the magnitude of Cincinnatus's final enlightenment.

Regardless, this book just vaulted to the top three of my favorite Nabokov novels (so far). Will it be knocked off of its pedestal by forthcoming titles? Tune in and see.

Finally! The Nabokov that I was seduced by in Lolita and King, Queen, Knave makes his reappearance! Though several of his prior books have involved self-obsessed narrators, Hermann is only the only one yet to hold a candle to Humbert Humbert. The joyous wordplay is present in all its glory, and the careful set-up of Felix's murder, as if laying all the architectural seeds for a long con, pulled me through the story to its end.

With a title like "Despair," I wasn't expecting a happy ending, but the many slippages in Hermann's memory, and the false leads he plays out (reveling in the fact that he is a self-admitted liar) are enough to hint that he may get away with it all. But of course he doesn't. Convinced as he is that Felix is his exact double, he never bothers to wonder if other people (like the police, maybe) don't make the same connection he does. Added to that Lydia's nervous nature of course bungling her performance to the cops, and Hermann is doomed. His capture is inevitable, and the last pages are a brilliant exercise in denial and megalomania, the most fitting end that I could have imagined for this remarkable book.

Meh.

I'm truly shocked to have this opinion of a Nabokov novel, but there it is. While there are some interesting elements, this book lacks any of the wordplay or passion of his other titles so far, as if Nabokov was just phoning it in (also of note is that this is the first of his titles without a foreword, as if even he didn't want to have to think about it again). Albinus is a naive fool, Margot is an utterly unsympathetic leech, and Rex is an amoral sociopath. The only character who evoked the least bit of my interest here is Paul, Albinus' brother-in-law, who displays the only thing close to morals in this farce.

I understand this to be a dark comedy, but the focus is much too much on the dark, and lacking the comedy. It is instead a farcical tragedy, and I immediately was reminded of two films that evoke the same tone -- Very Bad Things (1998) and Bitter Moon (1992) -- both of which left a similar bitter taste in my mouth.

Time to get out the Listerine and rinse the taste free, and hope that Despair fares better next month.

An interesting look at a Russian exile and flâneur roaming through Europe, with hardly any ambition other than to experience the world, to travel, and to woo Sonia, the daughter of the Russian family that takes him in while he attends Cambridge. He does well in his studies and athletics (especially soccer and tennis), has no problem getting laid, financially relies on a wealthy uncle (who becomes his stepfather), and generally has an easy time of things; the only nagging part of his life is Sonia, whom he alternately despises and lusts for, which is why, it seems, that even when he has his future laid in front of him, he can't get her out of his mind.

But ultimately, because Martin has such an easy life, he's not that interesting a character. His wanderlust, especially after his university graduation, take him all over Europe, but it often feels as if he's traveling just for the sake of traveling. He doesn't feel rooted anywhere, except possibly at his uncle's chalet in Switzerland, and his aimless drifting makes the plot feel more directionless than Nabokov's other works.

What I found disconcerting, however, was the total lack of mention of The Great War. Martin moves around from Greece to Italy to France to Germany to England to Switzerland (although not in that order), but not one mention is made of the reconstruction efforts made in those countries, no details that a continent-wide war had ever taken place. The last year mentioned in the book is 1924, when, I'm estimating, Martin is around 24 or 25; he would have lived through those terrible times, even as a boy, but the way Nabokov writes it, it's as if Europe of the time was a shiny happy place full of possibility and wonder; it's notable that he wrote the book in 1930, some years removed from those he writes about here, which may give a hint as to the rose-tinted nature of the narrative.

Not to say that no conflict is mentioned. Martin and his mother are exiled from Russia thanks to the Revolution, and it is this dislocation that drives his desire to sneak back in over the border from Latvia at the end of the book (an effort that leads to his death, as evinced by the future-perfect hints that are peppered throughout the final third of the book). I'm very much in line with Darwin's thinking after Martin has left: what had he thought to gain by doing something so stupid? If the cover copy is correct, why would he possibly think that sneaking over the border and back again would possibly impress Sonia? I'm just not getting it.

I did like tremendously the technique in the final chapter of shifting the point of view from Martin (whom we've been following all along) to Darwin, and then broadening out further to an objective omniscient view when Darwin tells the news to Martin's mother. We as the readers are not privy to that conversation, and it's as though, once Martin has left for Latvia, he has essentially become a non-person. He lifts himself out of history (to coin Orwell), and so instead of us being able to see him successfully (or perhaps not) infiltrate the Russian border, get caught, and then killed, we are left with his surviving family and friends trying to understand why he's done such a dumb-ass thing.

An interesting examination of identity. At times, I wondered at the relevance of some of the events in the story, and especially of the narrator's obsession with Smurov, before the climax informed me that they were one and the same man (I'd thankfully forgotten the back cover blurb that gives everything away).

I can't help wondering how differently the story might have read if Nabokov hadn't dropped the "narrator" a third of the way in, and treated the story more as a third-person POV, if he'd given us Smurov for the entire thing. But then again, he's dealing with identity, and disassociation after Smurov's suicide attempt, an act I still find difficult to understand. Okay, yes, the man he'd been cuckolding beat the shit out of him, but why would that drive him to want to kill himself? Was the embarrassment really so severe?

And so I get that after he recovers, and keeps telling himself that he's in the afterlife and that everything around him is a phantom of his former life, some kind of connecting bridge to move him from life into the great unknown, and he can justify becoming the "eye" that observes but doesn't participate. Everything that follows makes a sort of sense, but I'm still nagged by the attempted suicide. Maybe I'm hoping for sense within the mindset of a nonsensical narrator, but it just seems too much like a convenient plot device of Nabokov's so as to set the rest of the events in motion.

Anyway, once it is revealed at the end that the narrator is, in fact, Smurov, the text does feel more satisfying. The psychological journey he's taken in order to examine his identity seems to come full circle, although he's keen to point out that even the Smurov who tried to kill himself is not the real Smurov. And so I'm left at the end with all the different versions of the man, yet no objectively "real" version, which is quite an astute observation. We all wear masks depending on the situations we're in or the people we're around; is there really a "real" me? Nabokov seems to think not, and I'd tend to agree with him.

For such a relatively short book (less than 200 pages), I'm surprised at how long it took me to read it. Especially after the many delights of King, Queen, Knave. Possibly this may have been in the looser structure, where I frankly had no idea where the narrative was going; the episodic nature of the chapters gives no hint as to Luzhin's eventual obsessive descent and suicide, and most (especially after he gets married) plod along with his chess-playing days behind him, wandering the world in an aimless fog of "normality."

It could also have been the tendency toward extremely long chapters. Occasionally, one paragraph might cover several pages, and include long stretches of dialogue without any line breaks. The eye does need that bit of relief from a solid wall of text, and without it, the reading slows down considerably. This is one of my pet peeves with Franz Kafka's novels as well.

Or it might have been the fact that many characters, most actually, remain nameless, including Luzhin's long-suffering girlfriend then wife (who is alternately referred to as "the daughter," "she," and, later, "Mrs Luzhin," as if she has no identity of her own). I don't know if this is a particularity of Russian writers, or those in Eastern Europe in general (Kafka was notable for this, as well as Serbian author Zoran Zivkovic); anecdotal experiences do not equal to facts, so I hope that someone will correct me if I'm wrong. Regardless, it does distance the reader from the characters, who are distinctive otherwise.

But my complaints about technique aside, what really strikes me is the discordant pronunciation by Nabokov that the book "contains and diffuses the greatest warmth" of his Russian novels, when it can only be seen as the tragic downfall of the title character. Luzhin's obsession and genius at chess is the defining characteristic of his life, but following his nervous breakdown during his championship match with Turati, he is denied this outlet of his genius in the service of preserving his mental health. But obsession, as Mrs Luzhin comes to discover, can't be suppressed, no matter how one may try to ignore it. And the chess defense that Luzhin has been mentally striving to solve comes roaring back at the end, sending him out of a bathroom window to his death.

The parts of the novel that really struck me were in the interpretation of the real world as a chess board. When Nabokov gets into the meat of strategy and terminology, the prose sings on the page, but these instances are just too few and far between. Which is surprising after the lyrical playfulness of King, Queen, Knave. Your mileage may vary, of course, but the text on the page felt as stilted and static as Luzhin's post-breakdown existence, as if Nabokov couldn't give himself the linguistic freedom to explore Luzhin's plight.

Hi Mahesh,

Thanks for your comments; I didn't realize there was an official Nabokov group! I'll definitely post a note there to hopefully get some more eyeballs over here.

Prior to starting this challenge, I'd only read Lolita and The Enchanter, so I don't have his entire oeuvre in mind when reading these. I actually enjoyed KQK quite a lot, even if some chapters are a bit draggy. The relationship between Franz and Martha is one full of suspense, especially the idea that they might get caught, and the feeling that this all leads up to attempted murder kept me turning the pages.

(And having just finished The Luzhin Defense, I can say that KQK is like a jet ski compared to the plodding rowboat of TLD.)

But if you say this was actually a weak novel, then I have some very good books to look forward to!

Right away, I enjoyed this book more than Mary, and it's amazing to see Nabokov's immense leap in attention to craft and storytelling in such a short amount of time. There's much more of a sense of each character, and this is helped by the fact that he lets all three (Dreyer, Martha, and Franz) breathe throughout the novel. From the coincidental beginning to the tragic ending, the intertwining fates of our three face cards are thoroughly explored.

And Berlin comes into its own here as well. By the time this was published, Nabokov had been living in the city for two extra years, and that seems to make a world of difference. Where in Mary Berlin is a sketchy vague nebulous setting that just happens to be where the group of Russian expatriates all live in the same boarding house, in KQK the city comes alive, especially through Franz's visits on public transport and through his perambulations on the city's sidewalks.

The affair between Franz and Martha, and their decision to kill Dreyer, is telegraphed in the back cover copy, and so the lead up to it seemed slow, but after reaching that point in the novel, the rest of it races to the finish. The various considered methods of dispatching poor hapless Dreyer are comical in that they are easily dismissed because the adulterous duo don't know where to acquire poison or a gun, and then turn exactingly serious as Martha remembers her husband is a weak swimmer, and a good candidate for drowning instead. The irony of her backing off from this plan, and then dying from pneumonia caught whilst sitting in the boat is quite delicious.

Nabokov does an incredible job showing the progression of the relationship between Martha and Franz, from her assertive initial approach of seeking him out in his rented room, then the bloom of infatuation and early romance, to a sort of repetitive routine, to his comparing her appearance to a toad. The ways that Franz views her directly correspond to the immoral path on which she leads him, and the closer they get to the actual deed of killing her husband, the more he comes to loathe her. That mirroring of immorality with perception is a brilliant touch.

And the ending is just spot-on perfect. Franz's descent into a sort of madness, or at least of a highly confused befuddlement, and the way that Nabokov describes this and intersperses it with vivid dream imagery, is a marvelous capstone to such a wonderful work. The Kafkaesque uncertainty (could Nabokov have named Franz after Kafka? This book was written and published shortly after that other German-speaking author had died) that Martha is still alive, with the hallucinogenic last voyage to Swistok, to the very last paragraph where Franz himself has apparently split into multiple personalities all talking at once, is such a surreal way to end, and marks the confident command of the polished writer.

And also: Ganin is a real knob. I enjoyed the passages about his childhood (see above), but as an adult, he's a dick and a half. Upon seeing evidence of Mary's existence, Ganin's first impulse is to steal her from her husband, even ensuring that he gets drunk and incorrectly setting his alarm clock so that he'll miss picking up Mary at the train station, so that Ganin can swoop in. There's also the incredibly egotistical attitude that she'll drop her husband and fall into his arms, which is also irritating as hell.

Quite beautifully written, with Nabokov's hyper-aware sense of minute detail, all leading up to a meeting that, in the end, never takes place, and is dismissed all too quickly. I wasn't expecting Ganin to sweep Mary into his arms in a Hollywood-type ending, but still, the ending is so anticlimactic as to be unsatisfying. It doesn't negate the beautiful remembrances earlier in the book, but it does sting.

On of my favorite passages, from pages 59-60:

"No one at home knew about it, and life went on its dear, familiar summertime way hardly touched by the distant war which had now been in progress for a whole year. Linked to a wing by a gallery, the old greenish-grey wooden house with stained-glass windows in its twin verandas gazed out toward the fringe of the park, and at the orange, pretzel-shaped pattern of garden paths which framed the black-earth luxuriance of the flowerbeds. In the drawing room with its white furniture, the marbled tomes of old bound magazines lay on the rose-embroidered tablecloth, the yellow parquet spilled out of a tilted mirror in an oval frame, and the daguerreotypes on the walls seemed to listen whenever the white upright piano tinkled into life. In the evening the tall blue-coated butler in cotton gloves carried a silk-shaded lamp out onto the veranda, and Ganin would come home to drink tea and to gulp cold curds-and-whey on that lighted veranda, with the rush mat on the floor and the black laurels beside the stone steps leading into the garden."

I'll be using this paragraph to illustrate specificity of setting to my students, because wow.

Just so we can all keep track, here is Nabokov's bibliography* in chronological order (which is also the order in which we will be reading):

01. Mary
02. King, Queen, Knave
03. The Luzhin Defense
04. The Eye
05. Glory
06. Laughter in the Dark
07. Despair
08. Invitation to a Beheading
09. The Gift
10. The Enchanter
11. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
12. Bend Sinister
13. Lolita
14. Pnin
15. Pale Fire
16. Speak, Memory
17. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
18. Transparent Things
19. Strong Opinions
20. Look at the Harlequins!
21. Lectures on Literature
22. Collected Stories
23. The Original of Laura

* This is not a complete bibliography (which includes Nabokov's poetry, drama, and criticism, and can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir...), but these are the titles mostly available for our purposes.