Despair – 4/5
Literature is full of doubles. Whether this means the concept of foil characters who are designed to offset the lead character by contrast like Tybalt to Romeo or Fortinbras to Hamlet, twins and twinning, chiastic structures, repetitions in actions and plot, cycles of violence etc, or like literal doubles. In most of these stories where are actual double occurs we will get something like Mr Hyde as shadow-self to Dr Jeckyll or a trickster figure like in Dostoyevsky’s The Double and the like. In one of my favorite books as a kid, William Sleator’s The Duplicate, in which a kid finds a piece of technology that allows him to create an identical duplicate only to find out that copies have generational decay, it becomes almost too late. In this novel, we have a novel narrated by someone who knows he’s writing a novel. He tells us as such and playfully constructs the literal conventions such as telling us that he’s creating a scene or a description instead of actually doing so. In this way, he’s showing us the ways in which fiction creates clear artificiality out of reality. But then he finds a near double. His double is a low-class Russian (he’s a little more amorphous) and both are escapees from Soviet Russia. The double has better teeth. But instead of giving us a story of a man bedeviled by his double, Nabokov, and our narrator, give us a novel about a double bedeviling a man who was perfectly content to just live his life. He’s also deeply of Dostoyevsky’s novel as he writes (I mean both the narrator and Nabokov) and uses it a bit as a guide to decide the ways in which he wants to torment his double. This is one of the most fun of Nabokov’s novels (they’re all fun in their way) and also feels like the most post-WWII (in the very abstract way of calling something “postmodern”) of his Russian novels (though I still haven’t read The Gift, and then premise looks to have similar payoff).
Lolita – 5/5
Lolita still remains the novel that Nabokov sort of demands everyone who reads literature to reckon with at some point. It’s not my favorite of his books, nor do I think it’s his best. I think I have to say Pale Fire is the answer to both of those of questions. But it’s novel that refuses to accept your criticism.
The novel is really kind of four or five different novels in one. At the beginning we’re treated to a kind of European novel of ideas, early love, and memoir. This is something similar to novels by Turgenev or Le Grand Meaulnes. Of course as we’re reading this, what we already know is that this book we’re reading is a found text being published by a third party. We also know that (eventually) that Humbert Humbert is addressing some kind of judicial body. We also know that he refers to us as readers. There’s a lot of artifice, construction, and of course lying happening. And there’s the possibility of self-deception, but I am less convinced about that. Anyway, the novel then becomes a kind of mid-century suburban critique. The novel then becomes a road novel. Then finally, it becomes a mystery novel. Not only is there a detective (we think) but Lolita and Humbert go to many “underworlders” as he calls them in the theater. Every time you think you know what the novel is, it changes places on you. |
Look at the Harlequins! – 4/5 Stars
This is Nabokov’s final novel, written in English, and published not long before he died. In it, our narrator is a famous Russian and English-language novelist known for his playful, metafictional novels that inspect, interrogate, and ultimately undercut the assumptions we have about fiction, all while showing brilliant control and mastery of the language(s), both Russian and English they are written in. The novels this writer has produced include: A Kingdom by the Sea, Camera Lucida, Tamara, The Red Hat, Queen Takes Pawn and others that I am not fully remembering. He was also an exile from Russian for several decades, having grown up in a connected aristocratic family and leaving at 19, where he attended university at Oxford. He also published his Russian novels under a pseudonym.
So. Right? What happens in this novel is that the writer is creating his memoir now at the end of life. A few things that set his life off from the very familiar one described above is that he has been married several times, is known as a cheat and a letch, and has an uncomfortable and undefined relationship with a young daughter.
The novel seems to take the criticism that Nabokov received through most of his writing life and put it into life now under his own control as opposed to in the mouth and imaginations of his critics. At this point, he’s straight trolling. He’s going to confirm whatever you felt about him going into the novel by the end.