Transparent Things. New York, 1972 This novella, a National Book Award nominee, was published separately after first appearing in the December 1971 issue of Esquire. Reviewers scarcely knew what to make of this deceptively slim chaser to Ada, which had taken Nabokov over two years, off and on, to complete. With a complex network of disembodied narrators, it was inspired in part by Nabokov's stays in thin-walled hotel rooms that allowed him access to the unseen worlds of his neighbors. Finished on April Fool's Day, 1971, it was not issued in book form until the end of the following year. On publication day, he wrote in his diary that reviews "oscillat[ed] between hopeless adoration and helpless hatred. Very amusing." One such review called it "an unlovely and unlovable book that begins to touch the reader only the second time around. It is a masterpiece, of course." In an interview that was ultimately published only in Strong Opinions (1973), Nabokov stated: "Amongst the reviewers several careful readers have published some beautiful stuff about it. Yet neither they nor, of course, the common criticule discerned the structural knot of the story." He assisted by sketching its theme, "a beyond-the-cypress inquiry into a tangle of random destinies." Brian Boyd's analysis attempts to untie that "knot" with a more specific elucidation: "Within the small compass of Transparent Things and the bleak life of Hugh Person, Nabokov ruptures the relationship of reader, character, and author more radically than he has ever done, in order to explore some of his oldest themes: the nature of time; the mystery and privacy of the human soul, and its simultaneous need to breach its solitude; the scope of consciousness beyond death; the possibility of design in the universe."
Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov's pencils, ca. 1970s |
Russia
1899-1919 | Europe 1919-1939
| U.S. 1940-1960 | Switzerland
1960-1977
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