Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by buddhafish
King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov
3.0
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.
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.