By This guy is crazy….
About the Book
Title: Despair
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Published: 1934
Genre: fiction, classics, literary fiction
My Rating: 4/5 stars
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
“Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 – thirty years after its original publication –Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann Karlovich, a man who undertakes the perfect crime – his own murder.”
My Thoughts
Despair takes us into the mind of an utterly crazy, maniacally overconfident and yet beautifully verbose man named Hermann. Though the introduction warns us that he is worse than Humbert Humbert, he honestly is not; however, he is certainly something.
Like Lolita , this book brings readers disorientingly under the spell of a bizarre narrator with an uncommon way with words. This time, said narrator is a guy who, upon finding a random homeless guy who looks “exactly like him”, decides that he has hit the jackpot. He concocts a ridiculous plan to capitalize on this, all the while bragging about how brilliant it is. He will kill this man, but dress the man in his clothes so that the police believe he has died. Then his wife will collect the life-insurance policy, and he will be able to restart his life away from his floundering business.
This book was surprisingly funny, mostly because of the disconnect between the narrator’s bizarre behavior and his unawareness of it. He converses in manic non sequiturs, with half of his lines punctuated with exclamation points. Because of this, the “twist” at the end — that the other man did not actually look like his doppelganger at all, and he was not even close to getting away with his intended perfect murder — did not really land as a twist, more like a, “well, yeah”
Also, Hermann was really giving Raskolnikov . With the multiple explicit references to Dostoevsky (easily applicable in the case of The Double ) it was pretty clear this was something between a homage and a parody. Upon looking it up, it seems Nabokov was not a fan, so a parody. Per Wikipedia, the original title of the book was Notes of a Hoaxer in reference to Notes from Underground . What’s funny is that this week I briefly picked up Notes from Underground, which I read four years ago, to re-read portions, at the same time that I was reading this book. I was totally unaware of the connection.
Now, though, I really see the similarities between Hermann’s musings and the rants of the Underground Man, particularly in passages like these, which I initially noted for their eloquence:
“God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as the first. Indeed, imagine yourself just dead—and suddenly wide awake in Paradise where, wreathed in smiles, your dear dead welcome you.
Now tell me, please, what guarantee do you possess that those beloved ghosts are genuine; that it is really your dear dead mother and not some petty demon mystifying you, masked as your mother and impersonating her with consummate art and naturalness? There is the rub, there is the horror; the more so as the acting will go on and on, endlessly; never, never, never, never, never will your soul in that other world be quite sure that the sweet gentle spirits crowding about it are not fiends in disguise, and forever, and forever, and forever shall your soul remain in doubt, expecting every moment some awful change, some diabolical sneer to disfigure the dear face bending over you.”
Or this:
“If I am not master of my life, not sultan of my own being, then no man’s logic and no man’s ecstatic fits may force me to find less silly my impossibly silly position: that of God’s slave; no, not his slave even, but just a match which is aimlessly struck and then blown out by some inquisitive child, the terror of his toys.”
(Something something man proving to himself he is not a piano key … )
This is my first venture into Nabokov’s work beyond Lolita, which for better or worse seems to overshadow everything else he wrote. However, such a brilliant writer deserves to be recognized for more than his most controversial novel.
Have you read Despair by Vladimir Nabokov? If so, what did you think of it? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below!
If you liked this post, consider subscribing to Frappes & Fiction. I post about the books I read (even if they’re not fiction), the books I think YOU should read, and anything else on my mind.
Frappes and Fiction 