Only one author on earth can produce from me the following sentence: “Yeah, I’m reading this book called Despair about an insane murderer with no respect for human life, and it is HILARIOUS.” That author is Nabokov.In this, one of his lesser-known works, the egotistical and foppish narrator confesses to murdering someone who looks exactly like him in an attempt to collect his own life insurance money (and, more subconsciously, to rid the world of his weird doppelganger). Of course, Vladdy isn’t satisfied with a straight-up story, and slowly reveals that the first-person narrative we’ve been reading is really only just scrapping surface of what actually took place.As always with Nabokov, the language is beautiful and you are sure to learn at least a few new and awesome vocabulary words. You are also sure to either 1) write a bunch of new fiction with a weak, pseudo-retarded version of Nabokov’s style or 2) become paralyzed completely.Despair was one of his earlier novels, written in Russian in 1932 and then translated into English (by Nabokov himself, the goddamn genius) with extensive edits, in 1965. It’s absolutely fascinating to see a younger, less experienced Nabokov write - you can see all of the seeds of his future works. The themes that he returns to so often during the latter part of his career — mirroring, unreliable narrators, unlikable protagonists, mistaken identities, dark humor, botched violence - are here, too, a little more apparent and a little less smooth and adept.As a writer, I was happy to see a lower-level Nabokov - unlike in say, Pale Fire, where it is hard to pinpoint how he is pulling off the literary tricks he pulls off, in Despair, it’s a little easier to look into Nabokov’s mind and see the blueprints he was working with. For example, while it is hard to tell how he so subtlety reveals that Pale Fire’s protagonist is delusional, in Despair, I could pick up on specific techniques he was using to create Hermann, the book’s unreliable narrator. It’s sort of like watching a magic trick before the magician has perfected it — you can maybe glimpse a trap door or a string and get a clue as to how to execute it yourself.And while the exacting and masterful art of his later books is partially missing, his weird, twisted humor is on full display from the first page to the last. It might be the best kind of joke - 240 pages of non-stop dramatic irony which becomes more and more obvious with each page (all while the “author” is forced to continue complicating the story in order to continue deluding himself). And even while Nabokov can pull off a novel-length leg-pull, he also appreciates and condones the lowest forms of humor - puns and fart jokes. There truly was never a greater writer, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
The main character of "Despair" stumbles upon a perfect double, a literary tramp of sorts, and draws him into his murder plot- one that leaves many corpses in its wake.Nabokov/Herman kills off the main character, the double, and the real source of his despair, Dostoyevsky. His parody of the very genre that he despised is turned into the very device for his revenge upon it and its greatest Russian author. The result is brilliant.His weapon is the pun. At one point when Herman describes his search for a title to this story, he considers calling it "Crime and Pun". At another point in the novel Nobokov has Herman cleverly sequester Dostoyevsky's name in an anagram, as noted by Alexander Dolinin in "The Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in "Despair". [...]As a professor Nabokov reviewed Russian literature as follows:"Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. Leaving aside his precursors Pushkin and Lermontov, we might list the greatest artists in Russian prose thus: first, Tolstoy; second, Gogol; third, Chekhov; fourth, Turgenev." [Realizing the, really, silliness of such rankings, he adds:] "This is rather like grading students' papers and no doubt Dostoevsky and Saltykov are waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.""Despair," being his first novel, and one he carefully revisted thirty years after its original publication, it represents his break with what Harold Bloom referred to as an author's "Age of Influence". He took Dostoyevsky out into woods, dressed him up in his parody of himself, shot him in the back, stole his literary passport, and fled the scene of the crime and pun. Not a bad start to a stellar career. But I think Dostoyevsky had hold over him that he would never have really admitted to.
What do You think about Despair (1989)?
So I don't really know about this book. I mean I've read books where the plot is secondary, but in this book it feels a bit more like the plot is not only irrelevant but fighting to be included. You know that slime you play with as a kid that when you hit it it's hard as a rock, but when you go slow you kind of ooze through it. Well the plot of this book is exactly like that. It is trying really really hard to get through the sort of weird rambling, I think I am the best thing since well anything talk from the author. I do think that the entire voice of the book comes together really well at the end. I'm not really sure that I should explain how this happens cause it feels a bit like a spoiler to me. But if you are annoyed by the authorial voice I recommend finishing it, because I think that it resolves at least enough to be a reasonable voice. (rambling paragraph of questionable relevance)I guess on one level I don't know that I know enough about mr. Nabokov to make any judgments on this book, or that I ever will. It is hard to tell which parts of the narration are affected and which are simply the way that he writes. I went to the strand today because I was going to pick up another book by him (I left with kaddish for a child not born, the informers, thomas the imposter, the silent prophet, and the ladies of grace adieu) but I find that he and I have a more general problem that I am not interested in reading about any of the things he is interested in writing about. although, at strand they only had 4 books, and they were on the top top shelf and I had to use a ladder and it was scary. But basically my point being I am not going to be positive about this review until I find a second Nabokov I don't mind reading. There is a weird tonal thing in this book that it feels like a book that an author translated but wasn't good enough at the second language to translate correctly, but I think it was on purpose, there were a lot of "this sounds better in..." type sentences. Also it is a bit like reading heidegger or the economic and philosophical manuscripts the first 20 or so pages take hours but once you adjust to the style it reads only slightly slower than a regular book. that is all until I read him again.
—Jasmine
Despair is the title the narrator/”author” Hermann gives this book, but despair seems one of many states that are utterly alien to Hermann. A kind of story of a doppelganger evoking Poe’s “William Wilson” (obviously a favorite of Nabokov as Lolita makes allusions to it also) and Conrad’s “Secret Sharer”, and also a parody of that idea, and a parody of a novel. It is the novel that Hermann would write and a plunge into the reckless and unsettling (yet really hilarious) world of his disturbed and disturbing brain. A dark and fun ride.
—Adam
This is certainly not Nabokov at his best, but Nabokov at his best is literature itself at its best; Nabokov at his worst is still worthy of four stars and certainly worth reading. In his introduction, the author claims that resemblance between Hermann and Humbert Humbert is superficial. This is disingenuous, and most likely Nabokov expected us to see through this claim. As Hermann claims a false similarity with Felix, Nabokov claims a lack of resemblance between Hermann and Hum. In many ways Despair even reads as an early draft of Lolita, to the extent that I believe, in revising Despair, he must have inserted a number of references to Lolita (there are too many references to hazes and dazes and mazes and hums, and too few coincidences in Nabokov's writing). Overall, this pales in comparison to Lolita. It lacks the latter's subtlety, nuance, and a realistic base for the character's evil. Hermann's never as believable human as Humbert. We're never as bewildered by his sophistry. He never wins our sympathy as Hum does, ever so briefly.
—Rob Sheppard
