Despair, by Vladimir Nabokov

It took considerably longer than I had planned – indeed, hoped – but I have finished Despair, and thoroughly enjoyed myself, despite the extended period over which the perusal came to pass.

It is the story of egocentric, obsessive Hermann Hermann, who one day comes across a tramp and is taken aback by the familiarity of the face he sees – a face he recognises as his own. Over the course of the short, convoluted but accessible story, the concept of the Doppelgänger is played upon, and a compelling but disturbing psyche cartwheels like a clown in the circus.

Of course, the least perceptive of readers is going to recognise at once similarities between this H.H. and a certain another, which Nabokov (with typically contrary lexis) pre-empts in his introduction to his English translation:

‘I am unable to foresee and to fend inevitable attempts to find in the alembics of Despair something of the rhetorical venom that I injected into the narrator’s tone in a much later novel. Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other. Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann.’

He is correct, and Nabokov’s brush is, as far as my extending experience indicates, never one held in a way that does not point directly back at the man holding it – and though the isthmus (a brush-word of my own!) between the impassioned lover of nymphets driven to murder and the cold, callous puppet-master who murders for his own satisfaction and greed is objectively quite considerable, there are numerous ways in which Despair and Lolita are alike.

Here again is the cynical, distant but always entertaining narrator, venom or no. Here again are the characters seen through the eyes of such a man, and made pathetic, one-dimensional, weak – yet able to exert some control over the protagonist, here especially in Adalion’s letter.

Here again are the allusions to Russian texts, though less cryptic – I particularly liked Dusty and Turgy and the expertly pastiched epilogue! Here are smatterings of French, there the keen eye for nature. A little nymphet even makes a brief appearance, and – in Hermann’s mind at least – the pulchritudinous puppy plays a pivotal part in his puppetry. Why the plosives? Because there’s something of the baby-talk there.

The novel is an excellent work, darkly comic and genuinely sensitive as well as thought-provoking, it comes close to Lolita in my affections. I say ‘close’ because while it is more consistently appealing and a better-crafted piece of storytelling, it never soars to the heights of brilliance certain parts of that masterpiece reach – with waxen wings.

Objectively, it may even be a better book: even Nabokov’s obsession with making the reader aware of his authorial presence, a real annoyance in Lolita, is done in a feasible manner herein – imagining that Nabokov is only the recipient of Hermann’s manuscript, not its creator. Unnecessary, perhaps, but far less irksome.

There is also something in the quality of the pacing and the dialogue that reminds me of translations of Chekhov and Tolstoy, a certain comfortable, simplistic quality beneath the quilt of painstakingly detailed prose that appealed to me.