Chateau Lloyd

Until last week, the only Vladimir Nabokov book I read was, for obvious reasons, Lolita.  I suppose it is worth a post on its own merits, but my father, who is a serious Nabokov nerd, said it was not emblematic of his other work.

I therefore decided to read Mary, his first novel but one that only received an English translation after his career was well established.  It is a quirky book, not the most accessible and I found its conclusion to be unsatisfactory.  It's very much a first-try kind of book.

As I often say, you write what you know, and Nabokov wrote of being a Russian emigre in Berlin during the 1920s.  The tale is set in a pension filled with Russians from various walks of life.  The protagonist is Ganin, a young man who served with the "Whites" (counterrevolutionaries) and was evacuated from Crimea.  The story (which is quite short, barely breaking 100 pages) is about him finding renewed motivation to move forward with life via recollections off Mary, whom he hopes to meet soon.

Much of the text is taken up by description, which is precise and sometimes unsettling.  Ganin's physical relationship with Mary is described in some detail, which I'm sure was unusual at the time.  I'm sure some readers might fight it erotic, but it seemed to me that Nabokov was trying to recreate the sensations of the relationship with precision rather than eroticism.

While easy reading, I found the pacing to be slow and was heavily tempted to flip ahead to the end.  That speaks well of the tension, but it induced impatience rather than interest.

I've got some more of his stuff and will reserve judgement until I get deeper into his works.