After all, if this is not a topic in which he is interested, why does he keep on writing about it? The most obvious case is There are also too many bravura but irrelevant passages, long sequences of word-play in the (short) novel that are out of all proportion in their lack of significance. “To make a story quite short,” as Mr. R. says, Hugh has once been Mr. R.'s stepdaughter's lover, but then so has Mr. R. Hugh's first conversation with Mr. R. is a diamond of comic description: “'Any way — how are you?’ asked Hugh, pressing his disadvantage” is only a part of it. That sort of thing.can Nabokov really work his genius in so slender a volume as this?

These are Hugh Person’s thoughts of course, not Nabokov’s, but the frequency with which the subject recurs throughout his work (and this work in particular) makes them attributable to Nabokov.

Satire in between parenthetical asides. ); the Russian émigré (check! Outrageous quirks.

. Hugh has been to Switzerland before: once, in childhood, when his father fell down dead on a shopping trip; on another occasion to visit an author, R, through whom he connects with the woman who will be his wife.

Her mother dies soon after. Nabokov's attempt to achieve this is exemplary, here not any more than elsewhere. These characters are often witty (Humbert Humbert) sometimes crazy (Charles Kinbote) and on occasions they deliberately set out to bamboozle the reader (Smurov, in The Eye).In Transparent Things the un-named narrator seems intent on making the sequence and the … Facing him in the heavenly cable car she gave him a comparatively polite version of what she was to tell him a little later in disgustingly vivid detail. This was my second Vlad in a week, and sad to say it had nothing on the brilliant 'The Real Life of Sebastian Knight'. That happened a lot in this work. No, and just as he cannot recall where his old room was, or the exact color of the window shutters, it is plain at this start of a story for us, but the end of it for Hugh, that no one remembers anything. Fire blazes in dreams, in Armande's fear of being trapped in a hotel.

– it weren't for Nabokov's obsession with "nymphets", who play an unnaturally large part in this story. Hugh is undone by this memory of the dead, but without knowing it.He sees Armande for the first time wearing mourning for her father.

I read this exhilarating novella in a two-hour burst, knees bumped with bliss, hands clasped in delight, eyes lacquered to the page.This one is oh so clever without much soul.

. Published

For all his remonstrations that he was a profoundly amoral writer, Nabokov is one of the greatest humanists of literature, however when his novels are stripped of their moral core, whether it be Lolita’s sobs in the night, Pnin’s evocations of Mira Belochkin or Chernyshevski’s baleful mourning of his son, the novels tend to lose their vitality and power, instead their beauty and somewhat empty and hollow, like the faint iridescence of moonlight on an empty shore.I won’t call this facile because, you know, who’s to say? “I hate myself.” But most Persons love themselves, love life, love love, even man age to love the living.What death does not get rid of fire will destroy. You pick this up and it’s about a hundred pages, should be a quick read, no? . Something wrong here. )"It is generally assumed that if man were to establish the fact of survival after death, he would also solve, or be on the way to solving, the riddle of Being.

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. A nightmare wipes out at least two women; at the moment of dreaming Hugh's somnambulist's grip tightens on Armande's throat and she dies strangled. R.” Mr. R. writes in English. Tent pis if the reader fails to get the joke: Mr. Nabokov is impatient now, no one is to be coddled.

Wasn't until the last 20 pages or so that the book really caught me and sent my thoughts in motion.Nabokov is having himself a grand old time here. .

It's safe to say that for his 17th and penultimate novel, Nabokov had no intention of reinventing himself.

Welcome back. The intrusive narrator. Satire in between parenthetical asides. . All that remains of the mother is a French‐ Canadian accent Hugh cannot get rid of. For instance, three pages are devoted to the manufacture of wooden pencils, and there is an equally lengthy description of a trick tennis shot that Hugh Person thinks he has invented. Apart from half-formed philosophic observations on time and physical reality, he is presenting the story largely from Hugh Person’s point of view – but it is often difficult to know where one point of view ends and the other begins. This is intended to be playful and amusing, but his presence becomes over-intrusive without ever taking on the persona of a fully realised character. Death slips in and gradually takes over; the novella is not the work of a young man after all, but perhaps of another of its characters — a for eign‐born naturalized American writ er who lives in Switzerland and is known as “Mr. Or did he flirt with her in her first college year