Glory

Rating:
Summary: Uninvolving, and yet.....
Review: I found this a curious book. Up until the last few pages I did not care about any of the characters: even the main one, Martin, being so feckless, left me totally cold. I expected to finish the novel having appreciated the style in which it was written (which is excellent) but feeling utterly indifferent about the story line: just another well-written though utterly forgettable piece of fiction.

And yet, in the last few pages, Nabokov redeemed the story for me - sometimes it is worth persevering. It's best not to spoil the ending too much for those who haven't read the book, but careful concentration over the last pages bore fruit for me. I even forgave Nabokov for irritating me with the descriptions of yet another Cambridge fop (Darwin): how many of these quasi-Waugh Oxbridge stereotypes pop up in twentieth-century fiction?

One of the messages of the work for me was to engage with life, expect change, accept that people and situations will alter as time moves on. To paraphrase Proust: it's strange that people act as though today will last forever when all of our experience should tell us the opposite, that change is the normal state of affairs.

Rating:
Summary: youthful illusion
Review: This is a very good novel about the fantasies of youth, i.e. misplaced idealism, mixed with the dangers inherent in the revolutionary upheavals of the early 20C. It is a slice of history, which may interest or may not. As the novel is translated from the original Russian, it lacks the extraordinary narrative texture that the Nab's original English novels exhibit.

Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A Hero of His Time
Review: This novel was first published in Russian in 1932 and was much later translated into English by the author and his son Dimitri. In his interesting introduction to the book, Nabokov states that his original working title was "Romanticheskiy Vek", or "Romantic Times"; this was later changed to "Podvig", which can be translated as "gallant feat" or "exploit".

The hero of the book is Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian of Swiss ancestry. Like Nabokov's own family, Martin and his mother are forced to leave Russia following the Communist revolution of 1917, and take refuge in Switzerland, where Martin's mother marries his Uncle Henry, a cousin of his late father. Martin is sent to be educated in Cambridge; after graduating, he refuses to find a profession for himself, but travels around Europe, taking casual employment in Berlin and the south of France. The book ends with Martin performing the "exploit" of the Russian title, a clandestine crossing of the Soviet border from Latvia, but the ultimate outcome of this deed is left obscure.

Nabokov's two Russian titles for the work are both significant. Martin is a man of artistic temperament but without artistic gifts. He is bored and restless, something he has in common with the "superfluous men" of earlier Russian literature, such as Eugene Onegin or Pechorin from Lermontov's "Hero of our Times" (a novel Nabokov translated). (There is also, possibly, an echo of their obsession with duelling and honour in the rather ridiculous boxing match between Martin and his Cambridge friend Darwin). There are, however, important differences between Martin and these earlier anti-heroes. Their restlessness and boredom lead them into cynical, callous nihilism; Martin's lead him into a search for sense of purpose, something he remains optimistic about finding. As another reviewer has put it, he sees life as a "series of romantic possibilities." Whereas their sense of purposelessness is internal, arising from something in their characters, Martin's is external, deriving from his situation as an involuntary exile, cut off from his country by political events. It is notable that when he goes to Cambridge he chooses to study Russian literature and culture, rejecting Henry's advice that he should follow a vocational course. Memories of his childhood take on great importance for him; he chooses, for example, to live and work for a time in a particular French town because of the (mistaken) belief that it was the town whose lights he once briefly glimpsed during a night-time train ride as a boy.

Although the story is told in the third person, it is similar to a first-person narrative in that the whole of the action (except the last few pages after he has disappeared) is told as it appears to the central character. One of the most striking features of the work is the vividness of its descriptions of the physical world. Whether the scene is set in the Crimea, Greece, Switzerland, Cambridge, Berlin or Provence, there are plentiful references (at times in almost every sentence) to not only the sights of the locality but also to its sounds, smells, tastes and sensations. Martin is highly sensitive to the beauty of the world around him (something else, incidentally, that he shares with Pechorin)- lights seem from a train, the moon shining on the sea, a jay flying through blue sky above a snow-covered forest, or the scents of a Crimean summer.

Because Martin is so much at the centre of the book, the other characters are less prominent, although there are one or two sharp portraits- Uncle Henry, whose cautious pragmatism contrasts with Martin's romanticism, Martin's first love, the married Decadent poetess Alla Chernosvitova, Sonia Zilanova, the fickle, flirtatious daughter of another émigré family with whom he later conducts an on-off romance, and Darwin. (Darwin, incidentally, is not a fop, as some have called him. "Fop" seems an odd word to use about a winner of the Victoria Cross, and he often seems more practical and down to earth than Martin himself).

The motivation for Martin's "gallant feat" is left as obscure as its outcome. Was it some secret mission on behalf of his fellow émigrés? A desire for adventure? An attempt to impress Sonia? Nostalgia for his native land? Simple bravado? Nabokov provides no definitive answer to this question. Unlike some other reviewers, however, I did not find that the book was spoilt for me by the deliberately vague ending. In literature, as in life, mystery and ambiguity can be as interesting as precision and hard fact. Certainly, "Glory" is not a novel of the traditional sort, with a well-rounded plot with a beginning, a middle and an end, and should not be read as such. The fun of "Glory" lies elsewhere (to quote its author in a different context). The sensuous prose and the memorable portrait of a romantic young man in an age when romanticism was perhaps not in fashion make this a superb novel.