From the Bookshelf of Nabokov in Three Years…

Transparent Things

Vladimir Nabokov

Start date: January 1, 2014

Finish date: January 31, 2014

Discussion: Transparent Things

Discussion leader: Jason Lundberg

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Oct 12, 2017 Inderjit Sanghera rated it really liked it · review of another edition

There was a point-probably during Ada- where Nabokov’s fiction lapsed into the self-absorption and solipsism, where his stories became vehicles for him to exhibiting his idiosyncrasy and neuroses, where, instead of being transported into aesthetic bliss, the reader is instead transported into the malevolent madness of Nabokov’s characters; that is not to say that the novels are necessarily bad or aesthetically displeasing, indeed, there are more than enough purple passages to keep the reader goi There was a point-probably during Ada- where Nabokov’s fiction lapsed into the self-absorption and solipsism, where his stories became vehicles for him to exhibiting his idiosyncrasy and neuroses, where, instead of being transported into aesthetic bliss, the reader is instead transported into the malevolent madness of Nabokov’s characters; that is not to say that the novels are necessarily bad or aesthetically displeasing, indeed, there are more than enough purple passages to keep the reader going, rather they lack an essential capacity of Nabokov’s fiction; pity (he once famously quipped that the key theme of his novels is beauty plus pity). 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.

“Transparent Things” follows the story of Hugh Pearson; somnambulist, murderer, neurotic and madman, both the narrator and the plot contain devices and themes typical of Nabokov-unreliable narrators, memory, sexual deviance and meta-fiction, Nabokov never loses his gift of depicting the world in ever more original and beautiful ways-take, for example, his description of a pencil;

“It was not the hexagonal beauty of Virginia juniper or African cedar, with the maker’s name imprinted in silver foil, but a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac…the bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to plumbeous plum, thus merging in the tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood.”

As Nabokov once stated, it is the details that matter in art and whereas other writers may have been satisfied with a nondescript description of a pencil (wood, brown, led, nib) Nabokov’s aim was to render and describe the world in ways in which it had never been described before-that was the artist’s vocation. For Nabokov, true artistic brilliance lay in originality and Nabokov’s rendering of the physical world of the novel is brilliant, however, as mentioned above, it is the inner workings of the novel, the characters, which is lacking; Nabokov’s aim was never to create characters who the reader could “relate” to-he would have considered any such aim to be completely juvenile, however the characters are unable to escape from the web of two-dimensionality within which Nabokov entraps them, or, rather, as all of the characters are types seen before in his fiction, perhaps the reader has become weary of the recycled neurotics who re-appear within his novels.

In a watered down version of Van Veen’s treatises on time, the protagonist, Hugh, is obsessed with time; how to capture it and furthermore how to escape its ever-present grip and love-in this case the obsessive love of Hugh for his pretty wife, Marion. The novel dimly echoes and recalls ‘Ada’, however is far lighter and more effervescent, joyful even, and although it could be considered more than just a footnote on a lifetime of genius, it represents one of the lesser jewel’s in Nabokov’s crown. ...more

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Apr 22, 2014 Publius rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nabokov, novels, re-read, american

Probably the Nabokov novel that I am most ambivalent about. At certain times, the prose is beautiful and Ada-esque, but at other times, I feel like I am reading a messy collage of stories written by an aging senile genius. Forerunner of early post-modernism and I can see the influence it had on Pynchon. Ridiculous names start to creep into this work, particularly the protagonist, Hugh Person ("Huge Person"). Enjoyed the scene where the foreign lady could not pronounce "Hugh" so she called him "Y ...more

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