Glory

This is essential Nabokov. If this weren't one of his earlier works, I'd say that the master has done it again. Still, all the brazen overtness in prose has been polished away since Mary and The Defense. All the little prose games that make Nabokov a joy to read (relegating plot, sometimes even character to the background) is already well in place, though perhaps because it is in translation, the prose does not sparkle as it does in his English works.A word about the plot, it is very interesting when read against Kerouac's Vanity of Duluoz, both stories about drifterdom after college. Of course, the ending is inconclusive, but how? That's left as a surprise.

Great buy.

great book

I had never heard of this novel by Nabokov before I saw it in a used book pile. The author tells us in a foreword that this was one of his nine Russian novels, his fifth written in Russian (1932). The Russian title was Podvig, which means roughly “gallant feat or high deed.” It’s “…a story of a rarity – a person whose ‘dreams come true.’ ” But who needs “...relief from the itch of being!”In this quasi-autobiographical novel, a young man’s family circumstances are such that he’s been a world traveler since he was born. He comes of age in St. Petersburg and Yalta. He visits Constantinople and travels by ship from Athens to Marseilles. His family vacations in Biarritz. He lives in Switzerland and Berlin and then goes to school at Cambridge.His upbringing is equally international. His doting mother reads to him in English rather than in Russian because she “…found Russian fairy tales clumsy, cruel, and squalid, Russian folksongs inane, and Russian riddles idiotic.”His parents separate; then his father dies. He experiences puppy love, then his first serious sexual affair with an older married woman – pragmatism on both sides, rather than love. He eventually falls in love with a young woman who consistently refuses his hand in marriage but never quite turns him away.Yet he’s a golden boy. Bright and athletic. He’s a star at tennis and soccer, although he finds he can’t leave his Russian ethnicity behind in England. At Cambridge he feels like a foreigner, hanging out with other Russians and feeling that he is is a “foreign star” on the team. The bulk of the story is set around 1923.He loves to travel and he dreams of imaginary expeditions --- foreshadowing this story’s tragic ending.It’s Nabokov, so we have great writing. Like Virginia Woolf, there are extensive passages of descriptions of nature. Some passages I liked:“The crickets kept crepitating; from time to time there came a sweet whiff of burning juniper; and above the black alpestrine steppe, above the silken sea, the enormous, all-engulfing sky, dove-gray with stars, made one’s head spin…” “Martin was one of those people for whom a good book before sleep is something to look forward to all day. Such a person, upon happening to recall, amidst routine occupations, that on his bedside table a book is waiting for him, in perfect safety, feels a surge of inexpressible happiness.”“…he devoted every hour of rain to reading, and soon became familiar with that special smell, the smell of prison libraries, which emanated from Soviet literature.”Good writing and a decent story, but, of course, not the polished Nabokov of later years.

In some ways, the more Nabokov I read, the more confused I get. I suspect that Nabokov might actually be glad to hear that.I mention it in connection with "Glory" because this novel has so many autobiographical elements in it, yet the author himself warned us not to take it too literally. Maybe he's just playing games with us, as he often did. Or maybe we've just become accustomed to thinking that novels always reveal the author's actual past. Are authors really that unimaginative? Some might be, but not Nabokov."Glory," like a lot of this author's Russian novels, deals with a group of Russians who have fled the Revolution and find themselves in Europe. Martin Edelweiss, as his name suggests, has the good fortune to be part Swiss, so he and his mother have somewhere to go when the Communists take over (his parents are long since divorced and his father dead). They start in the Crimea, then move up to Switzerland, and Martin heads to Cambridge for university. Despite an interlude as a rural farm worker in France that gives him some peace, he finds himself longing to perform some daring exploit to impress a flirtatious girl named Sonia who refuses to marry him. So he decides to sneak over the border back into Russia.So much for the plot, which isn't the purpose of the novel anyway. In his introduction, Nabokov tells us two things. First, he says that "Glory" is his only novel with a purpose, and that that purpose is not the novel's story - rather, it's the opportunity to watch his character enjoy the generally normal and insignificant events of his life. Second, he informs us that the fun of reading "Glory" is to pick up on its various patterns, repetitive imagery, echoes along the time of Martin's life, and things like that.Well, I read the novel with these claims in mind, and it sort of works. For instance, Martin's endless searching for something new can get a little annoying until you recall that each of those searches follows a pattern established at the novel's start, when Martin as a child in the nursery becomes fascinated by a watercolor painting of a path disappearing into a forest. This image isn't so much a symbol of adventures as a calling for Martin, a way for him to explain why his life doesn't go the way he wants it to. He seems to think that if he stops looking around for mysterious paths, he won't be worthy of much, certainly not Sonia's love.Here's the thing - in almost any other novel, this early pattern of mysterious forest paths would likely lead to something easily explainable. Other authors, even excellent ones, might produce a story in which Martin learns to forget about such romantic notions, settles down and lives happily ever after. Or perhaps they might produce a story in which Martin insists upon the search for mystery and adventure, and either triumphs over all adversity and becomes a hero, or goes down to tragic disgrace. Some archetypal adventure story, in short. Be forewarned - Nabokov couldn't possibly care less about such things. He's interested in the pattern, not where it leads. He told us this quite clearly, so read "Glory" as he instructed us to. Do not expect him to tie up all the loose ends, or even any of the loose ends. Nabokov didn't seem to believe that there's such a thing as a loose end anyway. The pattern is what it is - the fact that it's carefully planned doesn't mean it has to be circular.As far as I know, "Glory" isn't considered to be a major Nabokov work. Nevertheless, it raises some interesting questions, and it's worth reading for that reason alone. For instance, as I said, Martin embarks on his quest to cross the Russian border to attract Sonia's attention, and to make himself feel worthy (at least that's what he tells himself). Just about everyone in his life, whether they find out about this project before Martin initiates it or afterwards, thinks that it's just about the dumbest idea they've ever heard. The author himself, if you read the novel closely, appears to agree that Martin's got no business endangering himself as he does (most of the time I don't bother you with the author's opinion of his own work, but Nabokov injects himself into his stories so often that it's worth considering). On the other hand, if Martin's search for glory is so idiotic, why bother writing a novel about it?Well, yeah, Nabokov says it's worthwhile because of the enjoyment we get from following the patterns the story produces, but that still leaves open the question of whether or not Martin's little jaunt actually gets him the glory he seeks. That's just one of those things that this author leaves up to you and me. It's probably a better idea to read Martin's search for glory as just another element in the pattern of "Glory" and let it go at that.Benshlomo says, If you play the game seriously, it might even get you what you want.

This brilliant novel by Vlad is a mind-blowing exposition of the basic precepts of novel composition from first principles with a few strong characters and a gradually intensifying drama propelled forward mainly by the surpassing brilliance and glowing premise of artistic descriptions. Descriptions that are at once of the most simple and most abstract themes, as well as being of substantial content to propel forward the narrative on their own to its shocking conclusion. There are several instances in this work where the tumultous and overflowing array of Nabokovian artistry reigns supreme (and in terms of sheer artistry this is the most opulent of his several works), and one of these is the train scene in one of the very first chapters,That moon's scintillating wake enticed one in the same ways as had the forest path in the nursery picture, and the clustered lights of Yalta amid the extensive blackness of unknown composition and properties reminded him too of a childhood impression.....it was then that he suddenly saw what he now remembered on the Crimean plateau- a handful of lights in the distance, in a fold of darkness between two black hills: the lights would hide and reappear, and then they came twinkling from a completely different direction, and abruptly vanished, as if somebody had covered them with a black kerchief...................and so on one can only rave about the lengths to which artistic interpretation can go to in a novel, and so one can only transcribe by the medium of a humble review or even by the firmer insistence of a mile length essay to do justice to the artistry that is Glory. I can only mention in passing that to read and appreciate this work or, in a more general term, the whole of Nabokov's opus one needs to find and see the beauty in the everyday description of things and places (as also in Proust), and appreciate their literary realisation via the medium of a novel.The fate of Martin Edelweiss in the novel represents the fate of a young mind that either is too fanciful and romantic, or that of one with an overtly imaginative intellect. I would like to place Glory in the top five rung amongst the novels of Nabokov that I have read till now, and besides this one will go as one of the top twenty novels of all time in my reading list till now.This is my ranking of the top five novels of Nabokov that I have read:1-Glory2-Pale Fire3-The Luzhin Defense/Lolita4-Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle5- Invitation to a BeheadingBy the way this is not a final listing of his novels as I have not yet read Laughter in the Dark, Pnin and a few others.