Look at the Harlequins! (Vintage International)

Rating:
Summary: A late beauty from the crusty sage of Montreux
Review: Assuming that you haven't read LATH, how to describe it? It's a fake sort-of memoir by the Russian emigre writer Vadim Vadimovich, the general shape of whose career bears more than a slight resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, with one important caveat; Nabokov was a famously happy and contented man (at least according to official versions of his life story), but Vadim is a cranky, impatient, cantankerous whinger. He thrashes his way through his basically unhappy life, turning out the odd book now and again and suffering rather than enjoying the occasional love affair, before finally finding peace with a radiant angel referred to simply as You - the book is cast as a long love letter to the supposed author's last love. Nabokov has good fun with the kind of critic who assumed in the wake of Lolita that he himself lusted after young girls (Vadim has a thing going with his own daughter, at one point); literary in-jokes aside, it's a remarkable study of a bitter and thwarted man from an author who was so supremely good at rendering happiness. Clearly, however free from demons Nabokov was, he was able to imagine what it would be like to be in their clutches. Not many writers do so well in their seventies.

Rating:
Summary: Unreliable memoirs
Review: Basically, this book is an ailing author's reflections on his life and works. The author is a very thinly disguised Nabokov - indeed, it is possible to treat "Look at the Harlequins" as a pseudo-testimony by Nabokov.

As such, it demands of the reader a familiarity with Nabokov's works - I can't imagine that the novel would have anything like its intended effect had one not read Nabokov's other novels. Whilst this is not uninteresting, it seemed to me that Nabokov was making two large assumptions:

(a) that, as I mentioned above, the reader would have the necessary background knowledge; and

(b) that the reader would be interested in this form of testimony as opposed to a straightforward autobiography (I confess I have not yet read "Speak, Memory").

Indeed, there is fun to be had with spotting the allusions to the real Nabokov's works. Yet, it seemed to me to be a rather sad book, not only because the main character is struggling with the onset of dementia, but it also reflects what I feel to be Nabokov's obsession with his status in modern literature - I suspect he wanted to be thought of as a great author, when in fact he was a middling one.

Rating:
Summary: Unreliable memoirs
Review: Basically, this book is an ailing author's reflections on his life and works. The author is a very thinly disguised Nabokov - indeed, it is possible to treat "Look at the Harlequins" as a pseudo-testimony by Nabokov.

As such, it demands of the reader a familiarity with Nabokov's works - I can't imagine that the novel would have anything like its intended effect had one not read Nabokov's other novels. Whilst this is not uninteresting, it seemed to me that Nabokov was making two large assumptions:

(a) that, as I mentioned above, the reader would have the necessary background knowledge; and

(b) that the reader would be interested in this form of testimony as opposed to a straightforward autobiography (I confess I have not yet read "Speak, Memory").

Indeed, there is fun to be had with spotting the allusions to the real Nabokov's works. Yet, it seemed to me to be a rather sad book, not only because the main character is struggling with the onset of dementia, but it also reflects what I feel to be Nabokov's obsession with his status in modern literature - I suspect he wanted to be thought of as a great author, when in fact he was a middling one.

Rating:
Summary: Metafictional Madness
Review: Beginning with a list of the author's "other" books, which don't exist outside the distorted mirror world of what Nabakov calls "LATH" (as he acronymically pegs Look At The Harlequins! within that book's own text) is a wildly inventive metafiction in the bilingually verbose hyper-alliterative Nabokovian mold. We get splendid sentences here on the jeweled gift of selfhood giving reason to resist suicide from whatever facet, cranky meditations on the author's pederastic proclivities and ego, and, most brilliantly, strange slips down the semiotic slope into madness. In two or three places in this book we find ourselves in a meticulously rendered literary reality and then, through a process of what one might call overdescription as exquisite as it is subtle, we find that our narrator has lost contact with the very rich world he has created for us; there is also a (to me) fascinating motif of the author's self-analysis of a strange spatial or geographical malady: he cannot mentally reverse himself and return after picturing a scene in his mind's eye. (This perhaps is meant as a sly parallel to time's one-way flow: time, which via the magic of the book, as opposed to the temporal incarceration of life, can be reversed--a hint of a kind of "law of nature" that might apply to a "real" metafictional character.) And despite the hefty overlap of the life of the protagonist with that of Nabokov (e.g., he has English tutors, Russian aristocratic blood, contempt for psychoanalysts, and the like), this book is clearly metafiction. The protagonist here, as with the protagonists in Transparent Things and Lolita, is fascinated by butterflies but not an entomologist of Nabokov's caliber. What makes LATH different from the work of other authors of metafiction's alluringly magical, "self"-indulgent mode, depends on the previous richness Nabokov has built up in his fictions which, from the Russian-drafted Gift to Humbert Humbert in Lolita, *already* deal with a protagonist much like the author. Thus the slippage here is not dual, between the author and his protagonist, but "trial" (as one might say), between the author, his protagonist, and the lives of his other protagonists, memorably Humbert Humbert of Lolita. Nabokov is having sly taunts: not only at America's image of him as author of Lolita, but at himself for being too quick to disidentify from that potent catcher of words and nymphs,
and finally perhas, at the ontological conceit of a fixed self that could be wholly either one or another. The protagonist here is a dialectical monster flitting between Nabokov and Humbert Humbert, a monster Nabokov himself capture's like a moth between LATH's pages. The last, and in some ways perhaps richest novel from a modern master.

Rating:
Summary: Metafictional Madness
Review: Beginning with a list of the author's "other" books, which don't exist outside the distorted mirror world of what Nabakov calls "LATH" (as he acronymically pegs Look At The Harlequins! within that book's own text) is a wildly inventive metafiction in the bilingually verbose hyper-alliterative Nabokovian mold. We get splendid sentences here on the jeweled gift of selfhood giving reason to resist suicide from whatever facet, cranky meditations on the author's pederastic proclivities and ego, and, most brilliantly, strange slips down the semiotic slope into madness. In two or three places in this book we find ourselves in a meticulously rendered literary reality and then, through a process of what one might call overdescription as exquisite as it is subtle, we find that our narrator has lost contact with the very rich world he has created for us; there is also a (to me) fascinating motif of the author's self-analysis of a strange spatial or geographical malady: he cannot mentally reverse himself and return after picturing a scene in his mind's eye. (This perhaps is meant as a sly parallel to time's one-way flow: time, which via the magic of the book, as opposed to the temporal incarceration of life, can be reversed--a hint of a kind of "law of nature" that might apply to a "real" metafictional character.) And despite the hefty overlap of the life of the protagonist with that of Nabokov (e.g., he has English tutors, Russian aristocratic blood, contempt for psychoanalysts, and the like), this book is clearly metafiction. The protagonist here, as with the protagonists in Transparent Things and Lolita, is fascinated by butterflies but not an entomologist of Nabokov's caliber. What makes LATH different from the work of other authors of metafiction's alluringly magical, "self"-indulgent mode, depends on the previous richness Nabokov has built up in his fictions which, from the Russian-drafted Gift to Humbert Humbert in Lolita, *already* deal with a protagonist much like the author. Thus the slippage here is not dual, between the author and his protagonist, but "trial" (as one might say), between the author, his protagonist, and the lives of his other protagonists, memorably Humbert Humbert of Lolita. Nabokov is having sly taunts: not only at America's image of him as author of Lolita, but at himself for being too quick to disidentify from that potent catcher of words and nymphs,
and finally perhas, at the ontological conceit of a fixed self that could be wholly either one or another. The protagonist here is a dialectical monster flitting between Nabokov and Humbert Humbert, a monster Nabokov himself capture's like a moth between LATH's pages. The last, and in some ways perhaps richest novel from a modern master.

Rating:
Summary: Futility or triumph of fiction?
Review: Nabokov can tear your brain apart with narrative. In nearly all of his works, and especially in Lolita and Pale Fire, he invites the reader to examine every word as a piece of the narrator, always insisting, "This is not me, and if you think it is, you're a dolt." What, then, are his determined doters supposed to think when finally confronted with Vadim Vadimovich, emigre-novelist, almost self-aware deranged fictional character, and butterfly-hater? God only knows.

Obviously, he's not Vladimir Vladimirovich. He's something else. Maybe he is meant to be an inevitable distortion of Nabokov, but even that's questionable, as is everything in Nabokov's fiction.

Here's a thought. Perhaps, as is (almost) evident in Transparent Things, Nabokov eventually became so intrigued by the idea of networks of perspectives in fiction (the perspective of the narrator interacting with that of the reader, and maybe just a tittle of his own), that he couldn't resist the idea of writing a novel from the perspective of a fictional fictional Nabokov.

All fiction can be compared to the reflection of a painting in a puddle. Nabokov teaches us that the aesthetics of the puddle's ripples, manipulated by the right hands, can be as (nay, more!) breathtaking than those of the picture itself.

Rating:
Summary: Commendable for its entertaining use of the word "dilatory"
Review: The only thing Nabokov accomplished here was to induce me to yawn at the head harlequin. HARLEQUINS is an exercise in (no--better make that "an excretion of") self-congratulatory lit-chat. It's a roman-a-clef that makes all the obligatory allusions to Nabokov's self-overrated oeuvre. It is a suffocating borefest. I got the distinct sensation of being hermetically sealed far up the netherlands of Nabokov's preening patoot. Although I did enjoy the following passage:

"Would I like to know something? (Dilatory sip and lip lick.) Well, at all my five public readings since the first on September 3, 1928, in the Salle Planiol, she had been present, she had applauded till her palms (showing palms) ached, and had made up her mind that next time she'd be smart and plucky enough to push her way through the crowd (yes, crowd--no need to smile ironically) with the firm intention of clasping my hand and pouring out her soul in a single word, which, however, she could never find--and that's why, inexorably, she would always be left standing and beaming like a fool in the middle of the vacated hall."

Rating:
Summary: heavy-handed game-playing
Review: To get all the book's humor requires not only having read the collected works of Vladimir Nabokov, but all the idiotic things forgotten reviewers wrote about his work. Vadim, the Russian émigré narrator is a parody of misconceptions - at least what Nabokov considered misconceptions - of his character, in particular, that he must have been a pederast . Nabokov was playing with various imaginable pasts for someone with his general background, but his play seems to me to be as heavy-handed as his narrator is incapable of happiness in any of his relationships. Compared to its immediate predecessors (the seemingly endless Ada, and the brief but opaque Transparent Things) Look at the Harlequins is readable, but for me the last novels are a marked decline from his earlier masterpieces.

There are certainly pleasures in the text and flashes of wit, but overall the fictional memoir of a passive cloddish alter ego is a disappointment, a not-very-fun series of games and in-jokes. It seems to me that Vadim understood but cannot implement the title's command. At least he doesn't enjoy those he manages to see as harlequins there to amuse him.

Rating:
Summary: heavy-handed game-playing
Review: To get all the book's humor requires not only having read the collected works of Vladimir Nabokov, but all the idiotic things forgotten reviewers wrote about his work. Vadim, the Russian émigré narrator is a parody of misconceptions - at least what Nabokov considered misconceptions - of his character, in particular, that he must have been a pederast . Nabokov was playing with various imaginable pasts for someone with his general background, but his play seems to me to be as heavy-handed as his narrator is incapable of happiness in any of his relationships. Compared to its immediate predecessors (the seemingly endless Ada, and the brief but opaque Transparent Things) Look at the Harlequins is readable, but for me the last novels are a marked decline from his earlier masterpieces.

There are certainly pleasures in the text and flashes of wit, but overall the fictional memoir of a passive cloddish alter ego is a disappointment, a not-very-fun series of games and in-jokes. It seems to me that Vadim understood but cannot implement the title's command. At least he doesn't enjoy those he manages to see as harlequins there to amuse him.