Tag Archives: Lolita

Book review

Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1957

Goodreads tells us that Pnin is one Nabokov’s “best-loved novels” and that it “features his funniest and most heart-rending character”, comments that I have to say gave me pause for thought. Published just after Lolita, Pnin is apparently the novel which established Nabokov in the public mind, or at least that much of it that exists in America. It follows the titular Professor Timofey Pnin, a comically disorganised Russian émigré lecturer working at an American college in the 1950’s. Pnin is an everyman character struggling with the challenges of everyday life – driving a car, taking a bus, hosting a drinks party, and not least the complexities of the English language. As you would expect with Nabokov the novel features a slightly sinister narrator who is far more than just unreliable but who towards the end of the novel seems to be actively malevolent towards Pnin. By this stage the reader feels protective towards Pnin, but the peril dissolves without coming to a head.

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Pnin was first serialized in The New Yorker and then published in book form in 1957.  It is everything Lolita is not – gently comic, uncontroversial in its subject matter, and comparatively straightforward. There are some autobiographical elements – Nabokov was a refugee from Nazi-occupied France, arriving in the USA in 1940, and taught Russian at an American university. I am a massive fan of Nabokov’s transgressive, challenging novels, so there’s no point in trying to disguise the fact that I was a little disappointed in Pnin. I am sure the problem was that I was expecting or hoping for something in the same vein as Lolita (or Pale Fire, another wonderful novel), and the gentle comedy just took me unawares. On its own terms its a perfectly successful novel, it’s just not the Nabokov I expected.

There is an episodic character to the novel, without doubt deriving from its original publication format. Pnin is sensitive to noise and moves from house to house, hoping to find a noise-free environment, but finding each noisier than the last. He tries painfully to be a welcoming host at his little dinner party, but ends the evening with the devastating news that he is being fired. He fails, then passes, his driving test:

“…If he failed the first time he took his driver’s licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled. He was more circumspect the next time, and passed…”

It would take a harder heart than mine not to be touched when he throws away the football bought with some difficulty for his ex-wife’s son after finding out he is not interested in sport. Slowly the character of a kind, well-meaning man at odds with the modern world emerges. On its own terms it is engaging and entertaining – I can see how it would have worked in serial magazine form, where there wasn’t time for the understatement to become underwhelming.

I am not sure whether it is best to read Pnin as a companion piece to Lolita, a palette cleanser after the monstrosities of Humbert Humbert, or to try and isolate the two works and read Pnin entirely on its own merits. In practice I suppose the latter is impossible, so the former it is. It is clearly from the same hand as Lolita, showing a command of the subtlest nuances of English which from a non-native speaker is breath-taking. Here’s Pnin recovering from having all his teeth taken out for example:

“A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.”

What an extraordinary collection of imagery packed into that brief paragraph! I can’t quite forgive Pnin for not being another Lolita, but I know it deserves more than that. At just over 160 pages it is the briefest of reads, so perhaps I should return to it when feeling less locked-down and in need for something escapist?

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Book review

Laughter in the Dark, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1932

Laughter in the Dark is a early novel by Vladimir Nabokov that contains some of the ideas and themes that he was to return to in the later Lolita.nabokov

First, a quick plot summary: Albinus is a prosperous middle-aged art critic living in 1920’s Berlin, who in a classic mid-life crisis takes a mistress, the amoral 17-year-old Margot. Margot is interested only in Albinus’s money, and quickly engineers a split between him and his wife. Margot wants to be in the movies, and Albinus indulges this and her every other fantasy, even though she is clearly a dreadful actress. The first of a series of crises then begins to afflict Albinus. His young daughter dies from pneumonia. He unknowingly reintroduces Margot to one of her former lovers, Axel Rex, with whom she almost immediately resumes an ‘intimate’ relationship. A holiday to the south of France accompanied by Rex, who has persuaded Albinus he is gay and therefore not a threat, goes as badly as you might expect, setting them all up for a tragic (if also comic) finale.

This is a relatively slight novel.  While it contains echoes of Lolita, it has none of that novel’s power and compelling characters. This was to me a previously unknown Nabokov, which is always cause for some excitement – I think he is one of the colossus of twentieth century literature – but there is little in Laughter in the Dark to detain the reader for long. The characters do not linger in the memory – they are all either vile and amoral – Margot and Axel in particular are two-dimensional villains without a shadow of nuance – or weak and uninteresting. Even Albinus’s brother in law Paul, who shows a bit of gumption when he finds out he is being defrauded by Margot and Axel, travelling to their holiday retreat and confronting them, is ultimately unable to intervene and prevent tragedy occurring. It’s not really a tragedy however – we don’t care enough about the characters to be upset when they meet their fate – but it’s not that comic either. The scenes where Axel taunts the blinded Albinus are cruel and unsettling, and probably come closest to tragi-comedy.

I keep however coming back to those echoes between this novel and Lolita. The latter is dominated by Humbert Humbert’s lust for his step-daughter, his consuming obsession with her youthful body. Light of my loins, etc. Lolita is portrayed as being indifferent to or even a bit bored by this obsession – she is aware of Humbert’s feelings and is able to manipulate him by using them, but she doesn’t reciprocate them. Or at least that is what the narrator in Lolita, Humbert, tells the reader. In fact it is clear that this is not the case, and that Lolita is repulsed by her abuser (see my review for a lot more on this). Humbert prefers his choice of narrative because it both explains her lack of affection for him and justifies his abuse. So there are two narratives – what Humbert is telling us is happening, and what the author reveals is going on behind Humbert’s self-justification. He is honest about his lust, but dishonest in his portrait of Lolita’s response. He pretends to be harsh on himself – she never really loved me – to disguise the fact he was abusing her all the time.

The relationship between Albinus and Margot is a pale imitation of this later ‘relationship’. Margot casually reciprocates Albinus’s lust. “She on her part was always ready to respond to his lovemaking; it only refreshed her” (note the “only”).

Here she is described after a day on the beach, putting on a show for Albinus:

“In the cool room with the red-tiled floor…Margot, snake-like, shuffled off her black skin, (her swimsuit) and, with nothing on but high-heeled slippers, clicked up and down the room, eating a sibilant peach; and stripes of sunshine crossed and recrossed her body”. (chapter 14).

I can’t think of another writer who would have described the act of eating a peach, in itself obviously sexual, as “sibilant”. Margot uses sex with Albinus as a way of getting what she wants – she tells him not to lay a hand on her until he has spoken to his wife about a divorce. Lolita, several years younger, is unable to exercise this form of power, even though Humbert consistently tries to portray her as behaving that way. So the equivalence between Margot and Lolita that some readers might be tempted to make is utterly wrong, even if both men see them in the same way. Albinus and Humbert are both dirty old men tempted by much younger women, but only one is a step-parent and child-abuser. Laughter in the Dark is at the same time a simpler and less troubling novel than its successor, but doesn’t ever escape from its shadow.

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