Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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KING, QUEEN, KNAVE by Vladimir Nabokov. 272 pages. McGraw-Hill...
This is Vladimir Nabokov's second novel, written and published in Russian in 1928, when he was a 28-year-old émigré living in Berlin. It was recently roughed into English by Nabokov's son Dmitri, then tightened and buffed to a cold brilliance by the author. "Of all my novels," says Nabokov, "this bright brute is the gayest. Expatriation, destitution, nostalgia had no effect on its elaborate and rapturous composition...
...elaborate. Even Laughter in the Dark (originally published in 1932 as Camera obscurd), which in setting, plot and theme strongly resembles King, Queen, Knave, is more intricately patterned. But King, Queen, Knave is tricky enough-the ap-pearance-and-reality theme as applied to the eternal love triangle. In Nabokov's idiosyncratic geometry, all three angles are obtuse: Kurt Dreyer, fiftyish, owner of a prosperous department store, is suffused with a jocular egomania; Martha, his 34-year-old wife, beautiful and sybaritic, is dimmed by compulsively romantic restlessness and anticipation; Franz, Dreyer's youthful nephew and employee...
Dreyer and Franz occasionally attempt to squirm out of the two-dimensional plane in which Nabokov holds them captive. But most of the time, all three are as flat and glossy as the playing cards suggested by the novel's title. This enables Nabokov to give them the nimble shuffle that characterizes the mercurial plots of all his Action...
...graceful and superbly controlled, reveal an informed intelligence that can plunge unafraid into the rip currents of Vladimir Nabokov or write a better analysis of the nature of parody than the very good one that appeared as preface to the anthology he was reviewing. And it is somehow endearing to know that the same hand that wrote The New Yorker's sane, knowledgeable review of James Joyce's recently discovered fragment Giacomo Joyce, also turned out the epic 1960 farewell to Ted Williams, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu...