Welcome to Litsy!

This is only my third Nabokov but he is definitely one of my favorite authors, and has been ever since I read Lolita. I've never read anyone who masters language like he does, and if anyone can get me hooked on upper-class misogynistic dinner parties and absurd love triangles, it's him. Nabokov himself describes it as his "gayest" novel in the introduction. Not the kind of gay we like, but still, I always love reading authors' own favorites.

My second Nabokov, from 1928. The last paragraph saves what is otherwise meh.

Note 1: Starts off with terrific evocative prose, but once the wife and nephew cross the line, it just becomes text.

Notes 2: it‘s almost a reverse Lolita, older woman onto young man (he‘s legal, at least).

Note 3: Not surprising, maybe, that Nabokov‘s woman becomes essentially a character attack.

Seems I hear a lot of negative about Nabokov. He could write, though. Here, Franz sees Berlin blurry without his glasses.

“Once in the street he was engulfed in streaming radiance. Outlines did not exist, colors had no substance. Like a woman‘s wispy dress that has slipped off its hanger, the city shimmered and fell in fantastic folds, not held up by anything, a discarnate iridescence limply suspended in the azure autumnal air.”

Starting this one. I‘m reading his books in order and this was supposed to be the second novel, from 1927-28 (written while he lived in Berlin). But when he and his son translated it, in 1968, in the Montreux, Switzerland, he rewrote several parts.

(Edited because I thought he was in the US in 1968. He left in 1961.)

Part 2 of 3: the second batch of fiction from the library book sale.