Tag Archives: Vladimir Nabokov

Thanks for Nothing

Vladimir Nabokov is the master of the paranoid, deranged, unreliable (take your pick or choose all three) narrator. If Lolita didn’t convince you, Pale Fire will. It’s a comedic feat and a delicious confection, but mostly it’s indelible.

Charles Kinbote is our narrator with the questionable judgment and perhaps unsound mind. Some describe him as insane, a remarkably disagreeable person, or a monstrous parasite of a genius. He describes himself as John Shade’s closest friend and most trusted advisor, even if they’ve only known each other for a few months and no one ever thought of them as friends. Their friendship “was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed.”

Shade is one of the great poets of his generation. He has almost finished his magnum opus when he dies. Kinbote takes possession of the unfinished poem and decides to edit it and provide helpful commentary and notes. Since the poem was Kinbote’s idea, he’s the most qualified person to finish it. Plus, it’s about Kinbote and Zembla, his home country. So who better? The English department at Shade’s university believes the poem has nothing to do with Kinbote or Zembla, a distant northern land no one has heard of. They think the poem is auto biographical and deals with the death of Shade’s daughter, the “waxwing slain.” These professors have written a letter in which they argue the poem has fallen into the “hands of a person who not only is unqualified for the job of editing it . . . but is known to have a deranged mind.” So who’s right?

Pale Fire is a delightfully strange novel. It consists of three sections: Kinbote’s foreword; the poem itself, also named Pale Fire; and Kinbote’s Commentary and Index. And let’s not forget that the story pointedly opens with a quote from James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson and ends with a murder. So who’s story is being told in Pale Fire? If there is a biographer, who is it? Is Shade a wavelet of fire compared to Kinbote’s bonfire? Or is Kinbote a pale phosphorescent hint trying to shine near Shade? What’s real here? Whether you’re able to answer those questions or not, Pale Fire is a remarkable journey with many laughs along the way.

Thanks for nothing, Gladiola. Aren’t you supposed to answer questions and not ask them? And why should I read about an unreliable guy with a shaky grasp of reality? Is this even literature? Because I only read literature. I’d better let Nabokov take over from here. “Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average reality perceived by the communal eye.” I hope that helps.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

My Dark Vanessa – Not Your Father’s Lolita

It is impossible to hear or read about a middle-aged man statutorily raping a teenage girl without thinking of Vladimir Nabokov’s classic, Lolita. If you need proof – even Sting, who will readily admit to being the greatest songwriter since King David, mentioned Nabokov in Don’t Stand So Close to Me. He tried to use Lolita’s name first, but nothing rhymes with Lolita.

In My Dark Vanessa Kate Elizabeth Russell takes Lolita and shifts the perspective to that of the abused girl. However, the pedophile here is not an unintentionally-funny, delusional, and ultimately pathetic Humbert Humbert. Quite the opposite, Jacob Strane (think of Strange), the 15 years old Vanessa’s English teacher, is an experienced and masterful manipulator, and he cynically preys upon Vanessa’s loneliness and desperation to be thought of as special. Early on he tells her that she has “something these dime-a-dozen overachievers (her fellow classmates) can only dream of.” Proving he is a master of the back-handed compliment as well.

Nabokov and Lolita feature prominently in this brilliant and creepy book. The title comes from Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which Strane is pleased to inform Vanessa has a passage where my dark Vanessa is rhapsodized as an admirable butterfly to be worshiped and caressed. Strane’s “grooming” of Vanessa also includes giving her his copy of Lolita, with his hand-written notes in the margins. Yeah, Strane is a disgusting creep, but Vanessa craves this attention, so she is incapable of seeing it. Or (just as concerning) she won’t acknowledge seeing it.

The story jumps between two periods in Vanessa’s life: her high school and college years (between 2000 and 2007) and 2017 at the height of the Me Too movement when she is 32 years old. Much like Humbert Humbert, Vanessa is an unreliable narrator who ends up deceiving no one but herself (again like Humbert Humbert, but without the ridiculous name). Initially, she refuses to accept that she has even been abused, as she insists the relationship (despite the obvious imbalance of power) was consensual. And she continues to grapple with the effects of the abuse well into adulthood. “I always seem to end up going out with . . . men who claim to be turned on by strength but can only handle women who act like girls.” Having the two timelines is effective. The reader sees how the sexual abuse of children was ignored even into the early 2000s, and then how it is everything but ignored at the height of the Me Too movement – where victims are pressured into telling their stories whether they want to or not. The reader experiences how the adult Vanessa begins to come to terms with the years of abuse. It isn’t pretty or romantic, but in a way it is heroic.

Regardless of its title, Lolita’s story was not told in Lolita. In My Dark Vanessa, it is. And the change of perspective (especially in light of the Me Too movement) is devastating. Because they have earned it, Vanessa and Lolita shall have the final words here. “What could we have done? We were just girls. . . . [It’s] not that we were helpless by choice, but that the world forced us to be. Who would have believed us, who would have cared?”

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor