This was my second Vlad in a week, and sad to say it had nothing on the brilliant 'The Real Life of Sebastian Knight'. The territory of Nabokov's peak, and his greatest achievements as a writer. That's all.ġ972.Hmm, something tells me this Novella would have been more greatly appreciated had it been written around 1952. By the way, did you know that the sum total of all material reality, with all its component parts, adds up to a big fat ZERO, and that we make fictions so that there is some positive net gain, some charge above the flatline, so that this grim furnace of dumb bodies we call the world isn't totally and inexorably pointless, voiceless, and doomed? Read this book in one sitting. Transparent Things also happens to be a concise formulation and summation of the ineffable eternal crystalwork that is 'Nabokov's metaphysics', of which I've written copiously on this here Goodreads site (all gratis, for free, I haven't even asked for one green dollar!), so I won't repeat myself. You can have your 1,000+ page encyclopedic mammoths of verbose density of such mind-warpage that you must compile dictionaries of new concepts and schematized flow charts of character interrelations (and I can have them too) but sometimes 105 pages of flawless, tautly interwoven pulses of prose is all that's required to send a lover of words into ecstasy. Quite often the things we fight for and manage to obtain turn afterwards into a source of our ruination…Ī perfect novella.

Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle. He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. He wins but is his triumph a guarantee of success? Next week he made it and thereafter established himself as less of a nuisance.

A fairy-tale element seemed to imbue with its Gothic rose water all attempts to scale the battlements of her Dragon. Our Person was obstinate and monstrously in love.

Hugh Person – the main hero – is an original but he doesn’t belong among the fittest… He falls in love and he desperately fights for the object of his passion. Transparent Things is a psychoanalytical comedy of manners… Dark, but comedy anyway. Transparent things, through which the past shines! Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object.

Transparent things nabokov