Oh, this book was a tough one to finish. I almost didn't complete it. The book gave me a headache, annoyance, and disgust (because of the story plot, not the writing style). I couldn't stop throwing hate towards the three evils who only cared about themselves and didn't care if their happiness destroyed other people's happiness: Albinus, Margot, and Rex.

n  Albert Albinus n, the main character, was a foolish man driven by lust and obsession. He had everything—a very good wife, a daughter, wealth, and a career. He was a shy and unadventurous guy, but that all changed after he met Margot. Oh, Albinus, the cheater who got cheated, how do you feel, sir? Is it all worth it?

n  Margot Peters n, a 17-year-old aspiring actress who lacked the talent to be a movie star but surely had something in her hands when we talk about being a good example of a manipulator and home-wrecker. She amazed me with her reaction when Albinus' daughter died:

“Don’t be so depressed, woggy,” she said to him a fortnight later. “I know that it’s all very sad, but they’ve grown to be almost strangers to you; you feel that yourself, don’t you? And of course, they turned the little girl against you. Believe me, I do quite enter into your feelings, although if I could have a child, I’d rather have a boy.”
“You’re a child yourself,” said Albinus, stroking her hair.
“Today of all days we must be in good spirits,” continued Margot. “Today of all days! It’s the beginning of my career. I’ll be famous.”


Her other iconic lines:
"I’ll never be happy until you get a divorce,” she said, sighing deeply. “But I’m afraid you’ll leave me, now that you’ve seen me in that disgusting film. Oh, another man in your place would have slapped their faces for making me look so monstrous! No, you shan’t kiss me. Tell me, have you done anything about the divorce? Or has the whole thing been dropped?”

“I can’t go on being only your mistress,” she said, pressing her cheek against his tie, “I can’t. Do something about it. Say to yourself tomorrow: I’ll do it for my baby! There are lawyers. It can all be arranged.”

n  Axel Rex n, he was pure evil. Quoting from this book, Rex is described as a person who “loved to fool people; and the less trouble the process entailed, the more the joke pleased him”. I really hope he got his very rotten ending, but sadly Nabokov didn't give Rex his well-deserved rotten ending in this book.

Nabokov famously disowned “Laughter in the Dark” and one can see some of the reasons why-it lacks the vivacity and verve, the poetic cadence of Nabokov’s prose, however it contains most of the themes which dominate Nabokov’s works; the vicissitudes of reality, of cruelty, the burgeoning sexuality of adolescence, solipsism and unreliable narrators. Some of the descriptions can be cloyingly clichéd and it lacks perhaps the complexity of his great novels, however traces of his genius and lyricism are dotted throughout the novel;

“It really was blue; purple blue in the distance, peacock-blue coming nearer; diamond blue where the wave caught the light. The foam toppled over, ran, slowed down, then receded, leaving a smooth mirror on the wet sand, which the next wave flooded again.”

The narrative follows Albinus, a rich, artistic but slightly ineffectual man who fulfils a long-standing fantasy by falling in love with the capricious, captivating yet hopelessly cruel Margot, who seeks to manipulate and upend Albinus with her lover, Axel Rex. There are echoes of other Nabokovian characters in the novel-Axel is a kind of fore-runner of Humbert and especially Quilty, Margot is a crueller and vainer version of Lolits and Albinus resembles Martin, the hero of ‘Glory’, but an older Martin inflated with smug self-satisfaction and lacking his moral refinement.

It is by far the most film-like of Nabokov’s novels-indeed many of the passages, such as the mime performance given by Axel against the blind Albinus, would make for brilliant film scenes and although it lacks the prosaic brilliance of Nabokov’s latter novels, it forms an important bridge in Nabokov’s transition to an artistic genius which was to last until the publication of ‘Ada’.

And so, there I was, sitting in a cinema.
The film I was about to see was called ‘Obsession’.
As I sat in the dark, I laughed to myself because if there’s one theme I’ve come across a lot in literature, what with Proust and Goethe and Mann, it’s obsession.
No surprise then that Albinus, the lead character in the movie, turns out to resemble Proust’s obsessive hero Charles Swann so closely that it’s hard to tell the difference between them. Like Swann, Albinus is a man of private wealth and refined tastes who collects art. And not only does he collect the work of famous sixteenth and seventeenth century artists, he also writes articles about them in academic journals exactly as Swann does. However, Albinus dabbles a little in fakes as well; he's interested in paintings that look so much like the originals that no one can tell the difference.
Interesting.
And so, because of the resemblance to Swann, I was soon on the lookout for the woman Swann obsessed about: Odette de Crécy. Sure enough, a few scenes in, Odette appears - she's an usherette in a cinema coincidentally.
Well, not the real Odette but a young woman quite like her called Margot Peters.
Margot is poor but ambitious, very ambitious indeed, and there’s something about her pale and fragile beauty that drives Albinus to distraction - he’s as deluded as poor Swann imagining Odette as a Botticelli virgin.

Within a few short scenes, Albinus has set Margot up as his mistress and given her lots of money to furnish her new apartment - which she does in a similar style to the one Odette chose for the apartment Swann gave her. And of course Margot’s choice in decor is not what Albinus would have chosen himself; like Charles Swann, he doesn’t really go in for chintz or chinoiserie.

And so Margot lies around all day in a chintzy kimono reading cinema magazines. She becomes very bored and soon finds more entertaining things to occupy her days such as shopping and being seen in smart places. Albinus is of course horribly jealous; he wants to know every detail of where she goes and who she speaks to. Swan and Odette all over again. The scenario is so like Proust's it's hard to tell the difference.

The other three-quarters of the movie examine just how far from his original life a man’s obsession can take him. There is a certain humour, but it’s all black.

……………………………………………………

And so, what you've read so far is a bit of a fake because I didn’t really see a movie.
No, most of what I've described can be found in the first section of this book with the very fitting title of Laughter in the Dark. It was written in 1932, and is the earliest Nabokov I’ve read and the only one, apart from Lolita, that doesn’t have some connection with Russia (although there is a lost cigarette case and there’s been such a cigarette case in the background of all Nabokov's Russian novels). This story is set in Berlin, like The Gift, but Albinus and Margot and all the other characters are German rather than Russian.

The book reads like a screen play; there’s very little descriptive writing but lots of dialogue, and we always know where the characters are in each scene so that reading is so like sitting in a cinema that it's difficult to tell the difference. There are even film scenes described in detail and some discussions about the difficulties of moving from the silent screen to talkies, all of which made me think that Nabokov must have had some interest in writing screen plays at this point in his career.

When I checked up on this, I found that this book had been made into a joint French-British movie in 1969 with the setting changed from 1930s Berlin to 1960s London.
I almost expected to find that the title in French would be L'Obsession but it was La Chambre Obscure (the dark room).
An excellent title as it turned out.