Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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TRANSPARENT THINGS by VLADIMIR NABOKOV 104 pages. McGraw-Hill...
Some day Vladimir Nabokov may succeed in writing a novel that is impossible to review. Certainly Transparent Things, his first new work since Ada, would be easier to review for an audience that had already read it. Like the work of any great writer, the book is best enjoyed when read for the surprises in the story, the diaphanous beauty of the prose, the clear irony and humor. But Nabokov makes such a reading infernally difficult. He is not only writing his story but writing about writing...
...sometimes called, and big N have a lot in common besides Swiss residence and a New York publisher. R is the latest of the unreliable, self-mocking fictional silhouettes of himself Nabokov has written. R has a nasty reputation for deflowering very young girls, wretched insomnia, and a contempt for Freud. Since R is a writer, N has opportunities for even more teasing. One need reach no farther than the book for words to praise it. R is a "true artist . . . with a diabolically evocative style." Indeed it seems that R's prose has "a richness, an ostensible dash...
...difficulty with the censors. The literary critics of the intelligentsia praised it for its social content, though Gogol minimized that facet of The Inspector General. He attempted to explain the play himself, always a dangerous course for a writer to take in relation to his own production. Vladimir Nabokov commented that this interpretation might well be considered "the kind of deceit that is practiced by a madman...
...closed world with that infinity inside, remains inexplicable. When, in the last chapter of Transparent Things, Person dies in a mysterious fire which re-enacts the dream in which he strangled his wife, does it mean that the being of the novel parallels that state of dreaming? Nabokov's last sentence tells of the death of the hero but also takes leave of the strange realm the novel has created: "This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pang of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being...