- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Classics; New edition edition (26 Jun 1997)
- Language Unknown
- ISBN-10: 0140181660
- ISBN-13: 978-0140181661
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.6 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,568,056 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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'He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language'
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
A dying man cautiously unravels the mysteries of memory and creation. Vadim is a Russian emigre who, like Nabokov, is a novelist, poet and critic. There are threads linking the fictional hero with his creator as he reconstructs the images of his past from young love to his serious illness.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Possibly the least well known of Nabokov's works in English; Penguin currently can't even be bothered to publish it, and it's not hard to appreciate why. It reads like the tired revision of a number of themes familiar from readings of other books of his, contained within a doppelganger motif, itself reminiscent of 'Despair', which references works by Nabokov by identifiable alternative titles, e.g. 'Invitation to a Beheading' becomes 'The Red Top Hat' and so on.
If you're familiar with Nabokov's ouevre, it's moderately entertaining to compare and contrast the repeated themes, but certainly would be one of the very last of his books I would recommend. If Nabokov is 'the Laureate of Cruelty', this is his equivalent of pulling wings off (butter)flies; pointless and distasteful.
If you're familiar with Nabokov's ouevre, it's moderately entertaining to compare and contrast the repeated themes, but certainly would be one of the very last of his books I would recommend. If Nabokov is 'the Laureate of Cruelty', this is his equivalent of pulling wings off (butter)flies; pointless and distasteful.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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10 reviews
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
A late beauty from the crusty sage of Montreux
24 April 2000
Format:Paperback
Assuming that you haven't read LATH, how to describe it? It's a fake sort-of memoir by the Russian emigre writer Vadim Vadimovich, the general shape of whose career bears more than a slight resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, with one important caveat; Nabokov was a famously happy and contented man (at least according to official versions of his life story), but Vadim is a cranky, impatient, cantankerous whinger. He thrashes his way through his basically unhappy life, turning out the odd book now and again and suffering rather than enjoying the occasional love affair, before finally finding peace with a radiant angel referred to simply as You - the book is cast as a long love letter to the supposed author's last love. Nabokov has good fun with the kind of critic who assumed in the wake of Lolita that he himself lusted after young girls (Vadim has a thing going with his own daughter, at one point); literary in-jokes aside, it's a remarkable study of a bitter and thwarted man from an author who was so supremely good at rendering happiness. Clearly, however free from demons Nabokov was, he was able to imagine what it would be like to be in their clutches. Not many writers do so well in their seventies.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Look At the Harlequins! is an intricate house of mirrors.
29 Jan 1997
Format:Paperback
Readers of much Nabokov should save this treat for last; this supposed autobiography by one "Vadim Vadimovich N." is a house of mirrors--is the main character really Nabokov? Or is he just someone with whom Nabokov is constantly embodied or misrepresented? Funny, witty, amazing--Look at the Harlequins! is material that plays with the jokes of Nabokov novels past, and rewards Nabokov fans with cameos by Lolita, Sebastian Knight, and many more. A must-read
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Futility or triumph of fiction?
13 Jan 2000
Format:Paperback
Nabokov can tear your brain apart with narrative. In nearly all of his works, and especially in Lolita and Pale Fire, he invites the reader to examine every word as a piece of the narrator, always insisting, "This is not me, and if you think it is, you're a dolt." What, then, are his determined doters supposed to think when finally confronted with Vadim Vadimovich, emigre-novelist, almost self-aware deranged fictional character, and butterfly-hater? God only knows.
Obviously, he's not Vladimir Vladimirovich. He's something else. Maybe he is meant to be an inevitable distortion of Nabokov, but even that's questionable, as is everything in Nabokov's fiction.
Here's a thought. Perhaps, as is (almost) evident in Transparent Things, Nabokov eventually became so intrigued by the idea of networks of perspectives in fiction (the perspective of the narrator interacting with that of the reader, and maybe just a tittle of his own), that he couldn't resist the idea of writing a novel from the perspective of a fictional fictional Nabokov.
All fiction can be compared to the reflection of a painting in a puddle. Nabokov teaches us that the aesthetics of the puddle's ripples, manipulated by the right hands, can be as (nay, more!) breathtaking than those of the picture itself.
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