Винаги ми е прятно да чета Набоков, дори и когато сюжетите му са по-олекотени и предвидими.

87th book of 2021.

Continuing with my chronological romp through Nabokov's early Russian novels I backtrack slightly to his second novel, King, Queen, Knave, on account of availability. This one has pretty good reviews but is the Nabo I've liked the least recently. An uncle, aunt and nephew: Franz is a fairly pathetic character who goes to work with his uncle and ends up in an affair with his uncle's wife, Martha. Though dripping with viscous irony, sometimes too much to bear, the novel drags at a slow pace. The plot takes some time to get going with a long long part of the opening focussed on Franz's train ride towards Germany. It is saved from utter boredom with an interesting plot device in that Franz loses his glasses and Nabokov showboats his prose ability with wonderful almost-blind descriptions of the world in a haze, a mass of colour, a fog of vision. The rest is fairly inevitable, sneaking around, dipping into the characters' heads, moving towards the only foreseeable outcome and novel question: are they caught in the end? Though deliciously written, I found it mostly underwhelming and dull at times, overwrought, even. I did want to read all his Russian novels before the end of the year though I'm unsure if I'll quite manage it. I've got 4/5 to go, depending if I count The Enchanter, which was written in Russian but published much later, posthumously. Either way, next up, The Eye, as I've already read his third novel, The Luzhin Defence.

I borrowed a 1968 hardcover of this "bright brute" from a professor. He wrote his name on the flesh of the pages pressed together next to the spine. He told me that if you want to get a book returned to you, that's the way to do it. I wish he hadn't.

What a delight this book is. Often, I find Nabokov overwhelming and a bit overbearing - I enjoy his non-English work translated by people other than himself far superior to anything else with his name on it - but this book is a trove of pleasant and hilarious banality and scintillating image. Its light ribbing of the genre it so lovingly dissembles itself as is brilliant, and the characters are cola syrup rich. Dreyer is a fantastic character; Nabokov's flirtation with and red-cape-in-deft-hands avoidance of the cliches of the bourgeois treachery genre is stupefying (in that colloquial use of the word, interchangeable for amazing, wondrous, terrific). I laughed really hard, several times.

What I'm trying to say, here, is this book totally rules. It kind of makes me want to reread the other Nabokov I shrugged at previously.

چند بار خواستم کتاب رو بگذارم کنار ولی فکر کردم ناباکف باید جایی چیزی غافلگیر کننده رو کنه. غافلگیریی که انتظارش رو می کشیدم رخ نداد با این حال در پایان کتاب حس پوچی و مسخرگی زندگی کاملا فلجم کرد. این تلاش مسرانه بشر برای مصادره آینده به شکلی که دوست داره و بازی دنیا و به رخ کشیدن این حقیقت که انسان موجودی ست به غایت ناتوان. نمی شد برای هر سه شخصیت شاه و سرباز و ملکه در پایان داستان دلسوزی نکرد. برای عشقهای فلاکت بارشان، حتی برای میزان جذاب یا غیرجذاب بودنشان که به خصوص در دو فصل اخر ناباکف سنگدلانه تصویرهای شکل گرفته در ذهن مخاطب رو هم به کرات دستکاری می کنه. مارتا از دید ادمهای مختلف داستان از زنی جذاب به پیرزنی غیرجذاب تغییر شکل می ده. فرانتس هم از پسر جوان ساده دلیی با ظاهری جذاب به پسری خرفت و مشمئزکنندهای تغییر چهره می ده. انتهای داستان نه تنها برای من مخاطب کل زندگی پوچ و مسخره ست ، بلکه احساسم نسبت به شخصیتها و تصویر ذهنی ام از انها مغشوش و لرزان و ناپایداره. فقط از یک نویسنده توانمند برمیاد که سوار طرح داستانی ضعیفی بتونه این احساسات رو منتقل کنه. با وجود این نقطه قوت، این رمان ناباکف بر خلاف خیلی از کارهاش اثری نیست که حاضر باشم یک بار دیگه بخونم.

یه داستان بدون کشش، که الکی کش داده بود.

Bir seyahatte daldığım bir sahafta rastlayıp, biraz zarar görmüş olsa da nefis cildi ile bu güzel baskıyla ters orantılı fiyatının cazibesine kapılıp almıştım. Nabokov'un gençlik dönemi (28 yaşında yazmış) ürünlerinden. Böyle bir romanı olduğunu dahi bilmiyordum, hoş bir sürpriz oldu.

Konusu aslında klişe. Zengin ve orta yaşlı kocasının parası dışında hiçbir şeyinden hazzetmeyen 30'larındaki bir kadın ile amcası olan kadının kocasının yanında çalışmak üzere Berlin'e gelen 20'lerindeki taşralı delikanlı arasında yeşeren tutkulu bir aşk ve bu aşıkların kocayı ortadan kaldırma çabaları. Fakat tabii Nabokov gibi birisi yazınca, klişe bir konu da bir edebiyat olayına dönüşebiliyor. Kendine has, karmaşık olabilen ve oyunbaz üslubu olay örgüsünün ötesine geçebiliyor. Ama olayların akışında da gerilim, merak duygusu iyi kurgulanmış.

Kitap ilk kez 1928'de Rusça olarak basılmış. Benim okuduğum 1968 basımının İngilizce tercümesini Nabokov'un işbirliğiyle oğlu Dimitri yapmış. Bizde İletişim basmış, umarım tercümesi iyidir. Çünkü Nabokov gerçekten tercüme edilmesi kolay bir yazar değil.

Upon opening Vladimir Nabokov's King, Queen, Knave (translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author), I was immediately struck by the degree to which certain passages reminded me of Proust. I consider Nabokov to be one of my favorite authors, and yet somehow this had never occurred to me. Maybe, I thought, the similarity is particularly pronounced in this novel, which I had never read before? But while this may be, I quickly realized that, previous to King, Queen, Knave, my most recent reading of any Nabokov actually happened before my discovery of In Search of Lost Time. Since I first read Proust the summer before returning to college and taking up French, this means that it's been a full decade since I read anything by this so-called favorite of mine. How does this happen? If nothing else, it makes me feel a bit silly for going around adding Nabokov to those "favorite author" lists on social media sites, when in reality I haven't read him in ten years.

In any case, the good news is that my appreciation of Nabokov's craft has only increased in the interim. Not only that, but now seems more or less the perfect time in my reading life to pick up this particular title: on the one hand, David and I are revisiting In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower via audiobook in preparation for our trip to Normandy in May, and on the other hand, the details of Madame Bovary are still clear in my mind thanks to Frances's excellent readalong of last October. Indeed, King, Queen, Knave is a more-or-less explicit re-working of Flaubert's novel, complete with playful intertextual nods: the trio of main characters, for example, goes to see a variety show that features selections from Lucia di Lammermoor, the same tragic Romantic opera that causes Emma Bovary to swoon. (This same variety show includes a mélange of other selections so delightfully and hideously heterogeneous that I can't help but think of Charles Bovary's hat.)

It must be said that King, Queen, Knave is not a novel for readers who need to sympathize with their characters. Despite the sordidness of Flaubert's protagonists, Nabokov's goal in re-shaping this story seems to have been to depict a world and a cast of characters even more banal and unsavory. The earnest Léon is transformed into Franz, a profoundly squeamish provincial whose dreams of the big city consist of making enough money to hire a prostitute now and then. Instead of loyal but clueless Charles, we get the abrasively jovial Kurt Dreyer, Berlin businessman and Franz's uncle, whose casual infidelities, ebullient athleticism and bizarre investment decisions distract him from the emotional lives of everyone around him. And in the place of Emma herself is Martha Dreyer, Kurt's disdainful wife and Franz's aunt, who considers an extramarital affair to be her social duty as a proper bourgeois Berliner, much like buying the right kind of furniture or knowing the latest dance steps. Whereas Emma Bovary expects high romance to result from taking a lover, Martha's satisfaction on seducing her nephew is more akin to checking off a box on a to-do list; this is true to such an extent, in fact, that she feels puzzled and irritated with herself when she shows signs of actual infatuation with Franz. Soon enough, Franz and Martha come to view Dreyer as an obstacle in the path of their rapidly-waning passion, and embark on a series of radically incompetent plots to do him in.

If not in the characters, then, whence the enjoyment here? Well, for me it came in passages like this one:

Yet if she must survive something had to be done. Dreyer was spreading out monstrously before her, like a conflagration in a cinema picture. Human life, like fire, was dangerous and difficult to extinguish; but, as in the case of fire, there must be, there simply must be, some universally accepted, natural method of quenching a man's fierce life. Enormous, tawny-haired, tanned from tennis; wearing bright yellow pajamas, redly yawning; radiating heat and health, and making the various grunting noises that a man who cannot control his gross physicality makes when waking up and stretching, Dreyer filled the whole bedroom, the whole house, the whole world.

This passage does so much work, and makes it seem so effortless. It's a portrait both of Dreyer, exaggerated and distorted through the lens of Martha's suffocating impatience yet still accurately evocative, and of Martha's disordered thinking as she becomes obsessed with the idea of her husband's death. It's plainly beautiful: I particularly love "quenching a man's fierce life," and the final image of Dreyer's movie-monster proportions in Martha's eyes. So too, the passage extends the novel's themes of disgust and the physical: Martha flees from Dreyer's "gross physicality" into the arms of Franz—who is equally squeamish if unfortunately also equally disgusting to the reader—only to end up inspiring disgust in her nephew as well. To top it all off, the entire passage is also a playful joke on Martha herself: despite having lighted upon the metaphor of murder as quenching a fire, and insisting that "there must be, there simply must be, some universally accepted method" of ending a life, it takes her an additional hundred-plus pages to arrive at the obvious epiphany that, like a fire, her husband could be drowned in water.

In addition to the exuberant beauty of his language, think it's Nabokov's lightness, his playfulness, which really got me on board with King, Queen, Knave. In contrast to Flaubert, one gets the sense the Nabokov takes neither himself nor his characters quite so seriously—and, by extension, that he does not envision the Marthas and Franzes of the world to be the only available alternatives to the author's own enlightened bohemianism, or any such nonsense. All three protagonists are horrible people, but I never got the feeling from this book that most people are horrible, or that the author is horrible, or that he thinks I am horrible. (Of course, if I hadn't had Madame Bovary to compare it to, maybe I would have felt differently.) The world outside the Franz/Dreyer/Martha trio, in other words, is not the hyper-realistic (read: suffocatingly banal) portrait of provincial life offered us by Flaubert, but is on the contrary brimming with strangeness and originality. Consider, for example, Franz's landlord, the great illusionist with the perpetually absent wife, who has convinced himself that his tenants are all figments of his own imagination; or the inventor financed by Dreyer, who is working on robotic, flesh-covered mannequins capable of walking around by themselves. I'm not sure whether these characters are supposed to represent artistic freedom or sinister madness (or both!), but they do give the impression of a more diverse realm of possibilities than does the world of Flaubert's Rouen.

And even if Nabokov does poke ample fun at his cast of bourgeois Berliners, the three protagonists are never cardboard buffoons, never anything less than people: his psychological portraits are insightful and eerily familiar, despite the reader's understandable desire to admit nothing whatsoever in common with the minds depicted. I was particularly in awe of the author's ability to combine, often in the same paragraph, several moods that seem mutually opposed. In this passage, for example, he begins with a Proustian reflection on dreams and psychological associations, transitions to an example of the phenomenon discussed, which rings true despite the silliness of his characters and their ridiculous behavior; and ends with a typically Nabokovian display of lingual virtuosity:

As happens in dreams, when a perfectly harmless object inspires us with fear and thereafter is frightening every time we dream of it (and even in real life retains disquieting overtones), so Dreyer's presence became for Franz a refined torture, an implacable menace. [ ... H]e could not help cringing when, with a banging of doors in a dramatic draft, Martha and Dreyer entered simultaneously from two different rooms as if on a too harshly lit stage. Then he snapped to attention and in this attitude felt himself ascending through the ceiling, through the roof, into the black-brown sky, while, in reality, drained and empty, he was shaking hands with Martha, with Dreyer. He dropped back on his feet out of that dark nonexistence, from those unknown and rather silly heights, to land firmly in the middle of the room (safe, safe!) when hearty Dreyer described a circle with his index finger and jabbed him in the navel; Franz mimicked a gasp and giggled; and as usual Martha was coldly radiant. His fear did not pass but only subsided temporarily: one incautious glance, one eloquent smile, and all would be revealed, and a disaster beyond imagination would shatter his career. Thereafter whenever he entered this house, he imagined that the disaster had happened—that Martha had been found out, or had confessed everything in a fit of insanity or religious self-immolation to her husband; and the drawing room chandelier invariably met him with a sinister refulgence.

"Invariably met him with a sinister refulgence"! Delicious. In the end, it was this sensual vitality of language that enabled me to leave King, Queen, Knave feeling exhilarated rather than depressed or disgusted, and kept me enthusiastic about digging into the more cerebral aspects of the novel.

نتونستم تمومش کنم. حوصله‌م سر رفت.

If I was to give Nabokov one single descriptive name, it would have been "The Lord of the Word". I don't think he was a master with words. He did not use them; he controlled them. Nabokov was beyond words. He was one of the few people who understood the difference in the meanings of the so-called "synonyms", and created prose in the way that has been least experienced ever. His writing, though often complicated, never pursues to be so. He is one unpretentious stylist; words do not tend to induce dexterity of their author. He masters his style, but prefers it to be undercover. Then, the reason for his style to be so astonishingly eye-catching is that he tends to write both brief and dense. His words are bound to create a vivid world which would leave its observer staggering with details. While reading any of his oeuvre, the reader would sense the scenes extrude from the context to obtain three dimensions in a twinkle. He is always full of picturesque sentences, each as expressive as a masterfully detailed painting.
“King, Queen, Knave”, one of his earliest novels, was written when he was yet 29. Hence could be explained the oddness of some of its features comparing with other Nabokov writings. One main thing to mention is the love triangle that occurs in this book. I don’t remember such situation being so tenderly present in his other stories. In here though, it is the original plot idea of the novel, and reflect even in the title.
One other surprise is the existence of another fictitious character with science-fiction characteristics. The namely “automannequin” is a kind of robot so human-like that can be mistaken for living organic people! And this creature happens to show up in a Nabokov novel! That’s mesmerizing.
In the famous quote from the first line of his preface on the English translation of the book, Nabokov claims such: “Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest.” One should admit this claim reading the book. “King, Queen, Knave” has a rich ironic satire that, in spite of the misery the three main personas go through, leaves such a brilliant mental image of the novel for the reader that remembering it would redraw many lively pictures of colorful decoration and sparkling hue.

I thought KQK was great; it's amazing that between 1926 and 1928 (between the publications of KQK and Mary), Nabokov became so much stronger as a writer. The plot of this novel isn't all that complicated, so most of the beauty lies in Nabokov's rich, almost visceral descriptions (the first couple of chapters particularly fucked me up). And I'm always impressed by the unraveling of threads and the infinity of realities that Nabokov manages to create. More of a 4.5/5, with my one quibble being that the ending was sort of...eh. It just kept going.

Thanks to an oddball schedule coincidence among different book clubs I'm in, I actually wound up reading two Nabokov novels back to back, a risky proposition for me since I’m not among his many fans. The first was Pale Fire which, as I discussed I a review of that work, I really hated, so much that I gave up a bit shy of the half-way mark. But I suppose there something to a huge chronological leap backwards. King, Queen, Knave was just his second novel. This one I really enjoyed – it’s my favorite among the Nabokov work I’ve read.

The linguistic gymnastics that are, I suppose, a big part of his “brand,” are present here, but in this case, I think they enhanced an already-nicely-offbeat story (young twit from the sticks goes to work for his uncle in the big city and has an affair with his hot-looking aunt and thing go wickedly wrong, but in a nastily non-cliché manner). Nabokov does go overboard every now and then, as he develops into the artiste he’ll eventually become.

Reading this gave me my first understanding of why Nabokov is so revered; keen observation, satirical voce, poetic expression, creative story construction, a willingness to boldly trample over squeamish sensibilities – this guy has it all. I see that now. The reason I think this one worked for me so much more than the others of his I read is (i) this is not his first effort; after debuting with Mary, he hit his stride on number two, and (iii) he hasn’t yet developed the artistic conceit that I think came to increasingly impact his later works.

داستانی شاید پیش پاافتاده از یک مثلث عشقی که گام به گام با ذکر جزئیات آن چه درذهن شخصیتها و محیط اطراف می گذرد ، روایت می شود .حتی بازی یک کاغذ رها شده درباد ازچشم نویسنده دورنمی ماند . ازآرامش به سمت هیچان و هرچه میگذرد تنش بیشترمی شود . وصف حالتها وافکار فوق العاده است وتصورمیکنم شاید تبحر فوق العاده نویسنده درشطرنج ، در چیدمان و توصیف احوال کم نظیراست . کتابی که هرکارگردانی میتواند بدون زحمت فیلمی ازرویش بسازد. ناباکف این داستان راپیش ازسی سالگی و حدود صدسال پیش نوشته است واین برتحسین من می افزاید .
طنز فوق العاده و جزئی نگری درکتاب مرابه یاد کتاب "تیتوس گرون " انداخت .