Despair - Vladimir Nabokov

Read for the second time in August 2012.

The first time I read Despair was about 12 years ago, and I was an undergraduate taking a course in 20th Century Russian literature in translation. For some while over the next twelve years, if asked to make a list of my favorite 5 or 10 books, I would invariably include Despair on that list. I approached this rereading, expecting to enjoy it, but nonetheless also expecting to remove it from that heightened place in my own personal canon.

This is for many reasons. I began to doubt the person who I was when I had initially read it. I put almost no other Nabokov that I’ve read including Lolita on such an exalted plane. The haze of my memory of it seemed to render it a work of less and less substance. There were other reasons that are difficult to articulate as well.

To my surprise then, upon re-reading it, I did confirm its greatness. While I confess that I probably will no longer place it among the 10 or so best novels that I have ever read, it is legitimately great, and it is the best and funniest Nabokov that I have encountered. It reminds me of something like Camus’ "L’etranger," though not quite as good, which to be honest, is probably the book I wanted to put in that slot in the first place, but felt self-conscious about being that guy.

The first time I read it, I loved the tone and the style, and I think those were it’s main charms to me. I don’t think I even understood the concept of an unreliable narrator yet. Now it jumps right out at me. The whole thing is spent trying to read between the lines to figure out what really happened. It’s a fun game, and engaging. I’m amazed to look back at myself many years ago enjoying this on a superficial level, but not really “getting” it at all.

I pull this great line for special emphasis: “…because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool.” Of course as used, it turns out not to be true. As of course, the narrator is wrong about just about everything. He’s a small-minded and vulgar bourgeois who fancies himself an intellectual, a genius, an artist, et cetera, a purveyor of the perfect crime.

We’re left to ruminate on the notion that the vulgar notice the similarities between things, while the artist notices the differences, as the artist Ardalion notes at some point. It seems then exceptional, that the narrator sees such striking similarities between himself and another, when to other people they bear no resemblance at all. It’s an apparent absurdity that he would even pass this supposed double off as himself, though shocking to the narrator that it does not work. It’s a funny thing. And the whole structure upon which this misapprehension is built and then demolished is entertainingly laid out within.