You! Hypocrite Reader! My Double! My Brother!

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	• Despair Vladimir Nabokov Vintage, 1989 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A most literary homicide...

With deliberate reference to Dostoyevsky, and sideways glances at Poe and Kafka, Nabokov's *Despair* takes on the classic literary theme of `the double' with gruesome, and often hilarious, results. Hermann, a failed businessman and aspiring writer, relates his story of one day coming by chance upon a tramp in the woods who bears a striking resemblance to himself. Alternatively repulsed, fascinated, and obsessed by his `twin,' he concocts a plan to commit the perfect murder...the criminal equivalent of the perfect novel.

Nabokov draws out the metaphor between murder and art all the way to the eerie conclusion of *Despair* and his self-conscious narrator is the perfect mouthpiece for expounding the central theme: the art of crime and the crime of art. Vain, egotistical, insecure, capricious...Hermann is the quintessential unreliable narrator, a self-admitted liar from childhood who lies simply for the pure creative joy of it. An artist, in other words...and, in this case, an author. Hermann creates fictions and his murder plot will be his `masterpiece,' except there are always a few flaws in any masterpiece and critics aplenty to point them out. In the case of murder, the critics are the police and a bad review means arrest, imprisonment, and possibly a death sentence.

*Despair,* in spite of its title, is a lot of fun, poking fun as it does at the conventions of the novel even as it exploits each and every one of them. In a sense, it's a book about writing as much, if not more than, the murder that is actually being written about. Nabokov thus adroitly turns an otherwise relatively conventional crime story into an existential commentary on the absurdity of the human condition and the ultimate failure of the artist to apprehend an entirely satisfactory expression of this absurdity. The question is: Can an artist get away with murder? Is any crime ((art)) perfect?

Whether as an extended and metaphoric meditation on art and personal identity or as a nifty, twisted tale of a mind unraveling into psychosis and murder, *Despair* is an impeccably written, entertaining, and intelligent novel by one of the 20th century's greatest writers.

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You! Hypocrite Reader! My Double! My Brother!

(Title purloined from Charles Baudelaire)

"Despair" is structurally one of Nabokov's most conventional novels. It's the tale of the plotting, executing, and unraveling of a 'perfect crime' - in this version, a murder for insurance - and the bare plot could have been handled by any of dozens of mystery hacks. What lifts "Despair" to a higher state as literature is the implicit dialogue, psychological as well as verbal, between the murderous narrator and the reader.

That Narrator, Hermann, is insufferable from the very first sentence: "If I were not perfectly sure of my power to write and of my marvelous ability to express ideas with the utmost grace and vividness..." But grace is hardly the hallmark of Hermann's style of narration; he's smug, parenthetical, digressive, and self-congratulatory throughout. Long before you the reader catch the spoor of Hermann's 'perfect' crime and escape - which turn out to be hopelessly imperfect and naive - you begin to despise the poor narcissistic bungler and to yearn for his come-uppance. What justifies Hermann's conception of his own marvelous writing talent is his allusive, evasive, condescending, snotty and snarky word-play, for which you will surely detest him... until you look in his mirror and see yourself, a person who delights in the snakiest word-play, who in fact is reading Nabokov precisely out of glee at such sophisticated verbosity. You! Dear Nabokov fan! If you attempted a 'perfect crime' wouldn't it be much like Hermann's? Would you be any less digressive and parenthetical? And wouldn't you also deceive yourself fatally?

Mirrors appear often in "Despair", often enough for a literary critic to pounce on their significance. "Despair" is another of Nabokov's books about a look-alike double, a theme that occurs so regularly in his work that one might suspect a mental aberration, a variation of Capgras Syndrome in the author. Whether the 'double' - Felix, a hobo - is really a mirror-twin of the narrator in anyone else's eyes is a question deliberately left open for the reader. The real issue of doubles, however, is the implied similarity of the writer and the reader.

Empathy with an insufferably egotistical murderer, by the by, seems more socially acceptable than empathy with a similarly insufferable middle-aged scholar who has a fetish for barely-pubescent girls. That's the lesson I draw from readers' responses to this novel compared with Lolita. No one, absolutely no one declares the the subject-matter of "Despair" is beyond the pale of empathy. Interesting...

"Despair" is NOT one of Nabokov's incomparable triumphs. It ends rather predictably, formulaically. Its virtues are in its details of language, once the reader overcomes her/his aversion towards the narrator. And just for thrills, for bonus points as it were, Nabokov lets Hermann in Chapter Six spout the most irrefutable, ineffably snarky demonstration of the non-existence of God you'll ever read. There are numerous snippy asides in "Despair" about Dostoyevsky and his novels Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Hermann's atheistical digression is patently a response to "Dusty's" mysticism. That's the kind of detail I refer to when I say that this is a book to be read for the pleasure of its digressions.

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Another Little Gem

Despair is probably not the first novel that comes to mind when thinking about Nabokov and his works and it may not even be among the top ten. But it is a Nabokov novel and that all by itself makes it worthy of our attention. Typically, it is a delight.

Nabokov's forward tells us that it was originally written in Russian while he was living in Berlin in 1934. There was an early, clumsy translation to English; then, in 1965, the final one. Nabokov describes it this way: "The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be some day is ambition in its purest form. The love is not reciprocated by the older man in his larger library, for even if he does recall with regret a naked palate and a rheumless eye, he has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth." The novel hasn't even started yet and already the reader finds a big grin crossing his face.

It is written in the first person by a German businessman, who, while walking in an unpopulated area one day, comes across a hobo who, to his surprise, looks exactly like him. The plot has to do with a scheme our narrator concocts then implements to use this unusual resemblance for his own unscrupulous monetary gain. It would not be prudent to give away more. Though it is a rather familiar formula, let's just say that it is nevertheless very intriguing but ultimately logical in its surprisingly unsurprising denouement.

As usual with the Nabokov novel there is a lot more going on than initially meets the eye. Our narrator, fascinated by his scheme and by his own perceived cleverness, views his plan as a work of art. He comments that all art and great art especially is based on deception. How hilarious it is to discover that his scheme ends in such a banal, predictable way and how clever that Nabokov seems to be poking a little fun at his own pretensions.

No review of a Nabokov work would be complete without quoting at least a couple of passages as his use of the language is so exquisite. Here is our narrator describing the unpleasant landscape immediately prior to his fateful meeting with his doppelganger: "One could not leave the steps of the path, for it dug very deep into the incline; and on either side tree roots and scrags of rotting moss stuck out of its earthen walls like the broken springs of decrepit furniture in a house where a madman had dreadfully died." Wrenching, and structurally, the astute reader might also wonder whether it contains an element of foreshadowing.

Here is a delightful aside: "Germans got their due [losing World War I] for that sealed train in which Bolshevism was tinned, and Lenin imported to Russia."

A final example, after posting a letter that would put his plan into inexorable motion: "I felt what probably a purple red-veined thick maple leaf feels, during its slow flutter from branch to brook."

It's Nabokov. What else is there to say?

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How far gone can one be?

This story is about a person who looks/acts relatively "normal", but who's inner desperation leads him to hallucinate--and act on these delusions--in order to see the things that he wants to see. Unfortunately, the world doesn't cooperate. I liked "Despair" because it enabled me to witness an experience from a deranged perspective, but again, it isn't one of my favorite Nabokov stories. It was kind of short, so that might have something to do w/ it.

great piece of literature

This book is really hard to get into, but once you push yourself, you'll really get into it. Nabokov is an amazing writer. Every character is just an exploration into the depths of language. Also, he really gets into the mindset of his characters. Thats why the writing in this book seems a little cold, a little distant...
So if you are up for something different, I would recommend this book.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965--thirty years after its original publication--Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder.

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