Mary

Rating:
Summary: a lucidly crafted pearl
Review: I'm not quite as enthusiastic about this book as the glistening and hyperboletic praise of the previous passages, but it is beautifully constructed nonetheless and composed (even in translation) with thunderous and lurking prose. I forgot everything else not too much later, but the style, the riffs of language certainly stayed behind. I am at present in a personal sort of 'study' period with my own hopeful career, and decided to alternate every novel Vladie here ever wrote, and some stories and plays, screenplay and criticism (even one of the translations), with other historical or just general reading. I'm going in order of publication. A promising start to a career.

Rating:
Summary: Magic
Review: Putting my obsession for Nabokov and for first novels in general aside, reading this was still pure bliss. Sometimes narrative breaks for the author to sneak in some philosophical musing about memory, but somehow it fits. Immature writer syndrome, I suppose, which i've caught in my own work.

It is a book about first love, and losing her, and then finding her again, but engaged to another man, who's not half the man you are. Nabokov questions how much you're in love with only the memory, and whether finding the flesh and blood girl again will ever fill the hole that your memory and desire have dug.

Makes interesting reading next to Martin Amis' first work, The Rachel Papers.

Rating:
Summary: Magic
Review: Putting my obsession for Nabokov and for first novels in general aside, reading this was still pure bliss. Sometimes narrative breaks for the author to sneak in some philosophical musing about memory, but somehow it fits. Immature writer syndrome, I suppose, which i've caught in my own work.

It is a book about first love, and losing her, and then finding her again, but engaged to another man, who's not half the man you are. Nabokov questions how much you're in love with only the memory, and whether finding the flesh and blood girl again will ever fill the hole that your memory and desire have dug.

Makes interesting reading next to Martin Amis' first work, The Rachel Papers.

Rating:
Summary: shadow of the greatness to come
Review: This novel is a good first effort, with vivid characters and a bìt of a surprise ending, which is one of Nab's trademarks. While I would never have read it for itself alone, it is interesting to see how a genius began in a new medium.

Rating:
Summary: shadow of the greatness to come
Review: This novel is a good first effort, with vivid characters and a bìt of a surprise ending, which is one of Nab's trademarks. While I would never have read it for itself alone, it is interesting to see how a genius began in a new medium.

Rating:
Summary: dont read this if u havent read this book yet
Review: Though I found this book in some pasages quite boring none the less I liked it very much ganin is a great character easy to hate for alot of reasons but mainly the guy like most of us lives in the past trying all his life to recapture a moment he thinks was the greatest and happiest moment of his life in the hopes of living it again in this case with mary the love of his life...but ofcorse sadly for all of us that can never happen again I dont think there are hollywood endings in the stories of nabkov just realistic ones...but still what a great ending an ending that confirmed the idea I had all through the book that some sort of awakening has to happen in his life and realization that the past no matter how beautiful it was can never be resurrected except in our memories and the reality of his dull,poor and ugly life is still a reality.But I think as ganin realised in the end that other maries waiting to be loved happier moments waiting to be lived can still exits in the future.