Despair

(Title purloined from Charles Baudelaire)"Despair" is structurally one of Nabokov's most conventional novels. It's the tale of the plotting, executing, and unraveling of a 'perfect crime' - in this version, a murder for insurance - and the bare plot could have been handled by any of dozens of mystery hacks. What lifts "Despair" to a higher state as literature is the implicit dialogue, psychological as well as verbal, between the murderous narrator and the reader.That Narrator, Hermann, is insufferable from the very first sentence: "If I were not perfectly sure of my power to write and of my marvelous ability to express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness..." But grace is hardly the hallmark of Hermann's style of narration; he's smug, parenthetical, digressive, and self-congratulatory throughout. Long before you the reader catch the spoor of Hermann's 'perfect' crime and escape - which turn out to be hopelessly imperfect and naive - you begin to despise the poor narcissistic bungler and to yearn for his come-uppance. What justifies Hermann's conception of his own marvelous writing talent is his allusive, evasive, condescending, snotty and snarky word-play, for which you will surely detest him... until you look in his mirror and see yourself, a person who delights in the snakiest word-play, who in fact is reading Nabokov precisely out of glee at such sophisticated verbosity. You! Dear Nabokov fan! If you attempted a 'perfect crime' wouldn't it be much like Hermann's? Would you be any less digressive and parenthetical? And wouldn't you also deceive yourself fatally?Mirrors appear often in "Despair", often enough for a literary critic to pounce on their significance. "Despair" is another of Nabokov's books about a look-alike double, a theme that occurs so regularly in his work that one might suspect a mental aberration, a variation of Capgras Syndrome in the author. Whether the 'double' - Felix, a hobo - is really a mirror-twin of the narrator in anyone else's eyes is a question deliberately left open for the reader. The real issue of doubles, however, is the implied similarity of the writer and the reader.Empathy with an insufferably egotistical murderer, by the by, seems more socially acceptable than empathy with a similarly insufferable middle-aged scholar who has a fetish for barely-pubescent girls. That's the lesson I draw from readers' responses to this novel compared with Lolita. No one, absolutely no one declares the the subject-matter of "Despair" is beyond the pale of empathy. Interesting..."Despair" is NOT one of Nabokov's incomparable triumphs. It ends rather predictably, formulaically. Its virtues are in its details of language, once the reader overcomes her/his aversion towards the narrator. And just for thrills, for bonus points as it were, Nabokov lets Hermann in Chapter Six spout the most irrefutable, ineffably snarky demonstration of the non-existence of God you'll ever read. There are numerous snippy asides in "Despair" about Dostoyevsky and his novels Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Hermann's atheistical digression is patently a response to "Dusty's" mysticism. That's the kind of detail I refer to when I say that this is a book to be read for the pleasure of its digressions.

Despair is probably not the first novel that comes to mind when thinking about Nabokov and his works and it may not even be among the top ten. But it is a Nabokov novel and that all by itself makes it worthy of our attention. Typically, it is a delight.Nabokov's forward tells us that it was originally written in Russian while he was living in Berlin in 1934. There was an early, clumsy translation to English; then, in 1965, the final one. Nabokov describes it this way: "The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be some day is ambition in its purest form. The love is not reciprocated by the older man in his larger library, for even if he does recall with regret a naked palate and a rheumless eye, he has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth." The novel hasn't even started yet and already the reader finds a big grin crossing his face.It is written in the first person by a German businessman, who, while walking in an unpopulated area one day, comes across a hobo who, to his surprise, looks exactly like him. The plot has to do with a scheme our narrator concocts then implements to use this unusual resemblance for his own unscrupulous monetary gain. It would not be prudent to give away more. Though it is a rather familiar formula, let's just say that it is nevertheless very intriguing but ultimately logical in its surprisingly unsurprising denouement.As usual with the Nabokov novel there is a lot more going on than initially meets the eye. Our narrator, fascinated by his scheme and by his own perceived cleverness, views his plan as a work of art. He comments that all art and great art especially is based on deception. How hilarious it is to discover that his scheme ends in such a banal, predictable way and how clever that Nabokov seems to be poking a little fun at his own pretensions.No review of a Nabokov work would be complete without quoting at least a couple of passages as his use of the language is so exquisite. Here is our narrator describing the unpleasant landscape immediately prior to his fateful meeting with his doppelganger: "One could not leave the steps of the path, for it dug very deep into the incline; and on either side tree roots and scrags of rotting moss stuck out of its earthen walls like the broken springs of decrepit furniture in a house where a madman had dreadfully died." Wrenching, and structurally, the astute reader might also wonder whether it contains an element of foreshadowing.Here is a delightful aside: "Germans got their due [losing World War I] for that sealed train in which Bolshevism was tinned, and Lenin imported to Russia."A final example, after posting a letter that would put his plan into inexorable motion: "I felt what probably a purple red-veined thick maple leaf feels, during its slow flutter from branch to brook."It's Nabokov. What else is there to say?

I read this book after watching Fassbinder's film adaptation of it. The film focuses on the protagonist's (the narrator in the book) dissociative personality disorder--how he watches himself as though standing outside himself, how he sees exact likenesses of himself in persons he doesn't resemble, and how his personality is generally splintering apart. He insists he knows who he is, as evidenced as he protests a portrait painted of him that he says looks nothing like him. There's a hint that this dissociation is a metaphor for, or at least an aspect of, the alienation felt by an expatriate in a foreign land. But his ultimate goal is to murder a person he thinks is his double. It raised a lot of interesting psychological and cultural questions and questions about the nature of the self that I'd hoped would be further developed in the book, but they weren't. Instead the book is full of literary jokiness that's too clever by half--page after page of the narrator's turgid prose, full of self-conscious commentary about the style of the writing, addressing the "dear reader", then you find that the "reader" being addressed is the novelist hired by the narrator to turn his scribblings into an actual novel and that novelist appears to be Nabokov--so who is at fault for the stylistic lapses? Very "meta". And apparently there are lots of jibes at Dostoevsky and puns. Fine, but not particularly entertaining in the context of the narrator's mental instability.On the whole I preferred Fassbinder's production over the book itself.

“I smiled the smile of the condemned and in a blunt pencil that screamed with pain wrote swiftly and boldly on the first page of my work: ‘Despair’; no need to look for a better title”.Ah, Nabokov! There is simply no one else like him in literature. In 'Despair', Nabokov weaves a weird and wicked tale of doppelgängers, machination, and insanity that leads its reader through the unsettled thoughts of a writer struggling to set out his memories of a strange sequence of events.It is the confessional narrative of one Hermann Karlovich, a Russian emigre and failed chocolate manufacturer who has dreamt of escape from his mundane existence. As he writes, he tells us self-reflectively how he is writing this account of the events that led to him being wherever it is that is now (the reader must wait until the end to find out where he is). But Hermann is the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, a self-confessed liar who - the reader soon learns - is clearly mad. So unreliable is our narrator that at times you wonder if he is writing this story from a padded cell.The story begins with an extraordinary chance encounter on a hillside outside Prague, an apparently mundane meeting that has a fatefully profound effect on our narrator. The tramp Felix that Hermann stumbles upon sleeping on the grass, minding his own business, is to Hermann's eyes his exact double. And soon an intricate plot starts to hatch within Hermann's mind, as he sees a way of escaping from the numbing reality of his existence.Nabokov writes with his usual wit, humour and characteristic playfulness with language ("What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?"). He subtly conveys to the reader some salient facts that fly in the face of the story that Hermann would have us believe. For example, it becomes abundantly clear in Hermann's account that his wife Lydia is having an affair with her drunken cousin Ardalion, but Hermann is blissfully unaware of it and continues to describe Lydia to the reader as his dutiful wife: "I had a bird-witted but attractive wife who worshipped me; a nice little flat; an accommodating stomach; and a blue car".The irony, of course, is that Hermann is Nabokov's creation, and - in as much as Hermann is the fictional author of 'Despair' - Hermann is, in a sense, Nabokov himself. Nabokov, however, seeks to disown any resemblance to his creation when, in the Foreword to this revised edition of 1965, he writes of his infamous creation: "Hell shall never parole Hermann". (Nabokov himself translated the 1932 original novel from Russian into English in 1965).I first encountered 'Despair' some 35 years ago when I saw Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1978 film adaptation of it, with Dirk Bogarde playing the demented chocolatier - now renamed Hermann Hermann. Reading Nabokov's novel now, I get memories of that film drifting back to me, and I can understand why Tom Stoppard would have wanted to create a film out of the book and why Fassbinder would have wanted to make that film. The notion of cinema runs throughout the novel: the idea of acting and creating an imaginary world, of escape through role playing, the use of performance and directing action to deliver a scene ... these are all here in 'Despair'. It is an almost unfilmable story, yet one that is so cinematic!Incidentally, I think Fassbinder did a wonderful job with it, and I am pleased to see his film - which disappeared almost without trace for over 30 years - is now receiving some positive reappraisal through its recent (2011) release on DVD. It is time I saw it again.Strange to say, the novel's dramatic (in more ways than one) ending reminded me of Gloria Swanson in Billy Wilder's film 'Sunset Boulevard' - which is, come to think of it, a rather Nabokovian film, with its descent into madness, its confusion of cinema with real life, its somewhat unusual narrator ... Could it be that Wilder and his fellow screenwriter Charles Brackett were familiar with Nabokov's work?It is difficult to recommend Nabokov because you will probably either love or loathe his writing, depending on what you want from your fiction. Nabokov is Nabokov, he is so unique and there is no one else with whom he can be compared. 'Despair' is many things: a murder mystery, a psychological thriller, a sly take on Dostoyesvsky's 'Crime & Punishment'. It will almost certainly be something the likes of which you have never read before.

Brilliant book, especially if you're a writer, it's so perfectly constructed, funny and meandering. I read it again straight away after finishing it, it was that good.

Book arrived on time and in good condition.

Excelent !

great