Mary by Vladimir Nabokov
At this point I’ve read almost everything Vladimir Nabokov ever published. There is simply no other writer like him. When I finish reading his prose, I immediately feel like holing up in a garrett somewhere and crafting sentences that dance and narrative strategems that make a first reading useless. If I actually get so far as to put pen to paper, I feel so dwarfed by the master that I quickly consign my pen to the dustbin.
Mary is Nabokov’s first novel, written when he was in Berlin in 1925, shortly after he met the inimitable Vera. Nabokov didn’t translate Mary into English until 1970, and he apparently resisted tinkering too much with his young effort. At least for those of us who want some reassurance that the man was human after all, this is fortunate. While many of Nabokov’s trademarks can be seen budding in this short novel–his somewhat condescending humor, his intricate adjective play, his narrative gamesmanship–none of them are really in full blossom. I’m reasonably sure I could spot it as a Nabokov a mile away, but had he not grown immensely after Mary, he would not hold the curlicued spot in our hearts he now holds.
The novel follows the young Ganin, a Russian exiled in Berlin–hmmm–who lives in a pension occupied by other idiosyncratic Russian emigres. One of these is expecting the arrival of his wife, the titular Mary. When he shows her picture to Ganin, our hero is shocked into reminiscences about his youthful romance with young Mary, his first physical love. Soon a plan is in the hatching, to intercept Mary upon her arrival in Berlin and to resume Ganin’s lost romance.
Of course things aren’t so simple, but nothing substitutes Nabokov’s unravelling of his own knots. Mary is ultimately not the recommended first stop on the Nabokov tour, but it is a joy for the completist. Which I am fast becoming. Next station, King, Queen, Knave!