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Despair

Updated: Oct 8, 2020

by Vladimir Nabokov

Rating: ****

I have not read Nabokov for quite a while. The writing is so unlike most other writing with long periods of complete existential genius. There are times where it becomes too clever and divergent just to showcase Nabokov's writing talent (I feel) which, I don't blame him and, which, provided flashes of utter brilliance.


At the beginning of the novel, I felt a more linear narrative would have reined in some of the unwieldy flights of fancy but towards the end I realised that the disjointed (understatement!) narrative is there to begin to confuse and distract your own mental state in parallel with the narrator's. The twist/s were not unexpected, and I think they are meant to be obvious, but that does not spoil the outcome as by the conclusion you become more absorbed in the narrator's reaction to events rather than the events themselves.


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