Nabokov in Three Years discussion

Quite beautifully written, with Nabokov's hyper-aware sense of minute detail, all leading up to a meeting that, in the end, never takes place, and is dismissed all too quickly. I wasn't expecting Ganin to sweep Mary into his arms in a Hollywood-type ending, but still, the ending is so anticlimactic as to be unsatisfying. It doesn't negate the beautiful remembrances earlier in the book, but it does sting.

On of my favorite passages, from pages 59-60:

"No one at home knew about it, and life went on its dear, familiar summertime way hardly touched by the distant war which had now been in progress for a whole year. Linked to a wing by a gallery, the old greenish-grey wooden house with stained-glass windows in its twin verandas gazed out toward the fringe of the park, and at the orange, pretzel-shaped pattern of garden paths which framed the black-earth luxuriance of the flowerbeds. In the drawing room with its white furniture, the marbled tomes of old bound magazines lay on the rose-embroidered tablecloth, the yellow parquet spilled out of a tilted mirror in an oval frame, and the daguerreotypes on the walls seemed to listen whenever the white upright piano tinkled into life. In the evening the tall blue-coated butler in cotton gloves carried a silk-shaded lamp out onto the veranda, and Ganin would come home to drink tea and to gulp cold curds-and-whey on that lighted veranda, with the rush mat on the floor and the black laurels beside the stone steps leading into the garden."

I'll be using this paragraph to illustrate specificity of setting to my students, because wow.

And also: Ganin is a real knob. I enjoyed the passages about his childhood (see above), but as an adult, he's a dick and a half. Upon seeing evidence of Mary's existence, Ganin's first impulse is to steal her from her husband, even ensuring that he gets drunk and incorrectly setting his alarm clock so that he'll miss picking up Mary at the train station, so that Ganin can swoop in. There's also the incredibly egotistical attitude that she'll drop her husband and fall into his arms, which is also irritating as hell.