Customer Reviews

Bend Sinister (Penguin Modern Classics)

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"Bend Sinister" is one of Nabokov's supreme masterpieces and like all great works of art it operates on many levels simultaneously. Not the least of these levels is that of the `black comedy,' one of the most savage and sophisticated ever written.

Krug is a world famous philosopher who in his youth was schooled alongside an annoying lad named Paduk whom he used to, almost felt compelled to, bully. Through some grotesque trick of fate Paduk has become dictator---of the whole country that is--- and most of the citizens are busy worshipping his calls to `duty.' Krug's wife has just died and he is deeply attached to his 8 year old son David. Paduk and his cronies are trying to get Krug to endorse the new regime--put his prestige behind it and give it more legitimacy. Krug's friends try to warn him to leave the god-forsaken country while he's still able, but he's a conceited and stubborn bastard with way too much faith in his own powers and the `goodness' of humanity. So he acts the wise-guy, sticks around and gets gradually pulled into a nightmare he can't wake up from.

By creating the Twilight-Zone-like imaginary land of Padukgrad, Nabokov frees himself from any specific locale and is able to incorporate multiple totalitarian state caricatures of the German, Italian and Russian variety all at once. Bits and pieces of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin all collide and overlap in the Paduk character.

Nabakov goes into flashback, and dream and `thinking' states quite often without warning, and without clearly indicating where one state ends and the other begins. It all flows together like reality. This is good because it forces readers to constantly stay on the alert or be baffled. He sets traps for superficial readers left and right and really doesn't want them reading his novel.

Through Krug's ruminations, Nabokov makes some of his most poetic observations about philosophical questions of life and death and existence.

The recurring motif of the oblong puddle emphasizes the connection between Nabokov's layer of life where it also occurs (revealed in the spectacular ending) and that of his fictional creation Krug.

Unlike the willfully ignorant leftist intellectuals of the West who were at the time busy worshiping Stalin, Nabokov in 1945 was fully aware of what was going on in the land of his birth and how it was going on. Nadezda Mandelstam's famous book about the Stalin era persecution of her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, "Hope Against Hope," which came out some 25 years later corroborates to a startlingly accurate degree many of the things Nabokov describes in his `fantasy' creation.

Bits of Lenin's speeches make appearances here and there. In Chapter 13 Nabokov uses sections of the Soviet constitution, full of non-sequiturs and idiotic declarations of `obvious fact with no further proof required' (which uninitiated readers will think are too absurd to be true), to emphasize just how absurd the `real' world can often be and how much stranger than fiction. In certain sections, Nabokov's savage wit becomes downright hilarious. During the conversation between Krug and Paduk, for example, there are constant interruptions where the `right way of addressing a dictator' is continually suggested, finally culminating in the entrance of the parrot with the note in its beak which is kicked like a football out of the room. This scene reminds me of the films of Luis Bunuel, one of Nabokov's few peers in the cinema.

In Chapter 5, despite his openly stated hatred of Freudian psychoanalysis, Nabokov gets into some heavy almost Jungian dream descriptions (though of course he refrains from analysis). Nabokov is never ignorant of ideas he might happen to despise. He also claims to be indifferent to politics which, again, does not imply ignorance, and the many subtle layers within "Bend Sinister" gradually and eloquently reveal the man's vast knowledge of the subject at its most sophisticated levels.

Nabokov reveals where his political sympathies lie through the flashback scene about Krug's new headmaster with open-minded `ideas,' who tolerates every `social' instinct but not the lack of any such instinct in an individual. Nabokov sides with the individual and against all kinds of socialist, leftist claptrap.

Especially choice are the farcical scenes which Nabokov uses to ridicule the flirting brutes and bimbos (Paduk's spies and foot soldiers) going about their business, doing their "duty," so they can get it out of the way and get on with the `pleasures' of their shallow, empty-headed existence. Not having the brains to see anything wrong in what they're doing (helping Paduk flush the country down the toilet), and feeling themselves to be fully `lawful' and in the right, they are outraged when Krug suggests they might be guilty of even as much as petty thievery.

Chapter 7 is the most bizarre chapter. Unlike the rest of the book, it's rendered in the present tense and reads as if it was a collection of Nabokov's notes about the different things he wanted to describe if he ever got to complete and `fill out' his writing in this very chapter; but this completion, `fleshing out' and description of things in more detail, this bringing of simple notes to poetically crafted sentences keeps getting interrupted by other ideas which intervene and disrupt things! (Didn't I say it was bizarre?) The first 14 pages are all in this odd state of limbo as the Ember character goes on blabbing endlessly about different interpretations of "Hamlet." Now, this is a fascinating puzzle and it's intriguing but it completely throws off the `flow' of the book. Nabokov drops a couple of sentences in there about how "he's still jesting," but as far as I'm concerned this is one jest that goes on too esoterically long and provides the only boring section of the book. Most people won't make heads or tails of these pages until they come to the end of the chapter. After the magnificent paragraph about problems of `translations' which is supposed to bring together everything that went before, but which will fly over the head of all but the most esoteric readers, Nabokov suddenly shifts into past tense again and gets back to the story at hand. It's interesting to go back after reading the rest of the book and study the structure of this chapter in more detail. Here "Bend Sinister" becomes a novel contemplating itself in the process of its making. In the end when Nabokov introduces the writer, i.e. himself, into the novel, we are already kind of familiar with him because of this chapter and several other less noticeable intrusions scattered throughout the book. Its rough parallel in cinema is the Fellini-style `film within a film' (8-1/2) or the camera pulling away on the director directing the very same pulling away of the camera on himself, i.e., an endless succession (Fellini's "And the Ship Sails On" ends this way).

In the last chapter, the adolescent games the mad (and yet paradoxically not so mad) Krug tries to play upon Paduk and his band of laughably absurd `serious' adult brutes, emphasizes the fact that dictators are just pathetic overgrown children and mocks everything `serious' about the so-called serious world of adults which is so often nothing but more childish nonsense. Krug has a flash that all this has happened before and in fact it has. This so-called `adult' world is not very different from the adolescent world within which Krug used to play pranks on Paduk, but with the very uncomfortable difference that now the price for playing those pranks is death.

"Bend Sinister" is full of poetic passages and Nabokov's own brand of Proustian memory investigations, and must definitely be read slowly and carefully. This isn't writing you just skim over for the story---the `real story' is in the style, and on a deeper level the main `character' is always Nabokov himself. One of the most interesting aspects of Nabokov's style is, of course, the way he constantly mocks all kinds of cliched writing conventions by never abiding by them, and though this is not as prevalent here as in "Ada," it's still a major obsession. So read slowly, reread, lock into Nabokov's imagination, and be amazed.

Gobsmacked. Speechless. I don't know what to say about this book. I finished reading it last night, and am still reeling in disgust. Bend Sinister is one of the few novels in which you can tangibly feel pain.

Ostensibly a dystopian fantasy, the novel couldn't be further from a well-meaning but cold-hopping diatribe like 1984. The problem with Orwell's novel, besides its naive sexual politics, is that its mode is as totalitarian as the events it describes. The 'reality' (i.e. its form, not contents) of the world of the book is total and unquestioned, as are Winston's responses. The reader must submit completely to the illusion. We are either on Winston/Orwell's side, or we are fascists.

Bend Sinister is 1984's polar opposite, profoundly distrustful of reality and illusion. Like 1984, the events take place through a single protagonist, Adam Krug, but this viewpoint is never textually stable: constantly ironised, undermined, splintered by other viewpoints, other texts, by the author himself.

The tone veers wildly between subjective contemplation, cool pastiche, terrifying farce and unspeakable horrors. Like all Nabokov's works, the most sublime linguistic, figurative and formal beauty is utilised to relate the ugliest terror and pain (I'm not sure about the novel's misogyny, though).

This textual unrest is appropriate to a world in which all norms and values are thrown out of kilter, and stamped on by jack-boots. Passages of delicate Proustian lyricism asset the primacy of the individual consciousness and aesthetic sense over the tyrannies that attempt to crush them; but if this consciousness cannot defeat tyranny, it can only go mad.

In the first novel he wrote in America, Nabokov explores the troubles intellectuals face under authoritarian regimes. Adam Krug is an "eminent philosopher" living in a fictitional dictatorship ruled by a former schoolmate of his, Paduk, whom he once bullied. Krug has to deal with the death of his wife, the closing of the university, and the arrests of all of his friends, all while trying desperately to shelter his son from the turmoil that surrounds them. Ultimately, this book is about a man trying to retain his sanity in an irrational world. This novel is not an easy read but careful attention is richly rewarded. Like all of Nabokov's writings, it has an abundance of pregnant images and word play. A changing perspective and narrative voice add a surrealistic tone. Nabokov's mastery of English has not yet reached the level it does in such works as Lolita and Pale Fire, but those who love his style will not be dissapointed

Bend Sinister (1947) was the first novel Vladimir Nabokov wrote in the United States, and his second novel in English. Like one of his later Russian-language novels, Invitation to a Beheading, it is explicitly political, in a way generally foreign to Nabokov. (Indeed, to write a "political" novel was rather against Nabokov's usual artistic philosophy, and in his 1963 Introduction to this novel, he takes pains to point out that the focus of the novel is the main character's relationship with his son, not the repressive political conditions which drive the novel's plot.) Bend Sinister opens with the death of Olga Krug, beloved wife of philosopher Adam Krug. Krug is left with an 8-year old boy, David, in a country torn by a revolution led by an oafish schoolmate of Krug's, Paduk, called the Toad by his fellows at school. The new regime attempts to gain Krug's support, offering both the carrot of a University presidentship and the stick of veiled threats conveyed by the arrest, over time, of many of Krug's friends. The brutal climax comes when the new regime, almost by accident, realizes that the only lever that will work on Krug is threats to his son, then, due, apparently, to grotesque incompetence, manages to fumble away that lever.
The novel is (one is tempted to say "of course") beautifully written. Passage after passage is lushly quotable, featuring VN's elegant long sentences, lovely imagery, and complexly constructed metaphors; as well as his love of puns, repeated symbols, and humour. The characters are well-portrayed also -- Krug, of course, and his friends such as Ember and Maximov, as well as villains such as the Widmerpoolish dictator Paduk and the sluttish maid Mariette. The novel, though ultimately quite tragic, is filled with comic scenes, such as the arrest of Ember, and comic set-pieces, such as the refugee hiding in a broken elevator. As VN asserts, the relationship between Adam Krug and his son is the fulcrum on which the novel turns, and it is from that the novel gains its emotional power. But much of the novel is taken up with rather broad satire of totalitarian communism. The version portrayed here is of course an exaggeration of the true horror that so affected Nabokov's life, but it still has bite. The central philosophy of the new regime is not Marxism per se, but something called "Ekwilism", which resembles the philosophy satirized in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" -- it is the duty of every citizen to be equal to every other, and thus great achievement is unworthy. (It is not to be missed that Paduk was a failure and a pariah at school.) All this is bitterly funny, but almost unfortunate, in that it is so over the top in places that it can be rejected as unfair to the Soviet system which it seems clearly aimed at. That's really beside the point, however -- taken for itself, Bend Sinister is beautifully written, often very funny, and ultimately wrenching and tragic.

This is an intelligent, black satire of a state where mediocrity is celebrated and intellectualism denigrated.

Ironically many American reviewers (above) identify the political philosophy of this state as essentially communist. Nabokov repeatedly denied this. In fact he was trying to get at something deeper than simple left or right labels. What happens when confirmity becomes the norm? The obtuse, arrogant, intellectual non-conformist - like Krug - is inexorably drawn into conflict with a society that demands his allegiance. And like Kundera's character in The Joke or Oscar Schindler, or even Socrates the bloody minded become heroic. Not out of an impulse to heroism, just because they refuse to conform.

After the fall of communism it is interesting to reflect whether the US with its relentless celebration of folksiness and denigration of "intellectual elites" more resembles Nabokov's dystopia than we realise.

Doesn't a semi-educated president resemble Paduk? Don't all American children swear an idiotic oath of allegiance to the fatherland in much the same way as was demanded of Krug? Don't officials lock up hundreds without trial in the name of protecting freedom? - apparently unaware that they are busy destroying it. Isn't America the land of overgrown adolescents, ignorant, unreflective, blithe, pleasure seeking and armed? Of course non-conformists are not killed these days. They are emblazoned with the scarlet letter of Anti-American. A modern-day word for heretic. It is interesting to reflect that there is no equivalent word for people who criticise Britain, or France, Sweden, Canada or Spain. Why? Because the nation is not so closely identified with a national philosophy and because criticism is not regarded as threatening. This how evil arises in the world. We stop reflecting why and simply assume that our actions can only be for the good.

Ekwist lives - unfortunately.

Of the five books I've read by Nabokov, this is my favorite. I'll spare mentioning that being one of his first America-written, English books, he masters the English language. (Oops. I mentioned it.) As often as people credit him for his inventiveness in his stylistic methods (which is at full experimentation here) you just don't hear enough about his amazing imagination.

This book is set in a fictional European country, which is what initially fascinated me. It's quick, funny, sad, nostalgic, and haunting. People always use that word: `hautning'. But what does that really mean? In the case of this book, from beginning to end, we're introduced to a dream. I've read plenty of book descriptions in which people say a book is `haunting' or `dreamlike' in order to convey its surrealism, but this book is a perfect example. The end of the book, without giving too much away, is terrible (in the sense that it's sad/horrifying/abrupt) but in a good way. The book is short, and honestly feels as though it IS trying to convey the feel of an epic dream that goes on all night, only to go from slightly dreary to overwhelmingly awful, and in such a short book, this nightmare manages to progress wonderfully. By the time I finished the last page, I honestly felt like I had awaken from a terrible nightmare.

This book is good on many levels. Not only do you have an interesting storyline, but Nabokov never hesitates to free himself with only the best prose experiments and shifts in narrative that I've ever read. While other authors tagged as `post-modern' barrage us with stream-of-consciousness or switching narrators, falling short of even telling a story right, Nabokov uses methods that not only delight us with their originality, but help the story move along better. A good deal of the story is told in third person, but we have occasional lapses...one chapter is told in first person as a memory piece, speaking TO his dead wife. Absolutely beautiful. Another chapter is told in a strange, present tense walk through of events with bits of philosophical dissection thrown in the midst, as though the main character is splicing the narrative up with one of his essays. Even the third-person portions are just pure poetry. It's like a poem disguised as a novel.

Read this book now. The only CON I have is that the author is dead.

Bend Sinister is a story about the rise of the party of the average man and the struggle of the country's foremost philosopher, professor Adam Krug, against the totalitarian regime that comes to power and its leader Paduk.

Though one of the most dreadful stories imaginable, Bend Sinister is told masterfully, complete with brilliant descriptions that give the reader everything needed to engage the imagination and make a far-off, vaguely Eastern European country come to life. Always helped to understand Krug's frame of reference, the reader is given description after description of small, everyday things that might remind the protagonist of the kidney that failed in his wife and led to her death at the beginning of the novel.

Like the horrific story Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist ultimately succumbs to the totalitarian regime. For my tastes, perhaps typical of the American optimist view, I prefer to see the protagonist ultimately succeed in the face of tyranny. (Ayn Rand, who like Nabokov, fled Soviet Russia and landed in the United States, which was designed specifically to prevent the rise of a tyrant, wrote many stories of the individual vs. totalitarianism.) That said, Nabokov chooses not to show the success of the individual but the failure of a dictator his regime to get the one thing that it prizes not because of the individual's strength but because of the regime's own ineptitude.

The novel is both brilliant and deeply disturbing. In its conclusion, the reader finds the author finishing the novel, in a wonderful (and welcome) device that helps the reader to make an easier transition from the intensity and emotion of the story that concludes with the insanity of the protagonist back to the reader's own real world, where one would hope that such dreadful stories are only found in works of fiction.

Bend Sinister is widely regarded as the most political of Nabokov's work but I think it correct to consider the book not a political novel but a philosophical one. Perhaps by the time one moves to the real of public policy there can be no real difference between philosophy and politics but Bend Sinister shows a world view clearly -- where a totalitarian regime, no matter how well-intended, no matter how noble its goals are assumed to be, can succeed. This world view, interestingly enough, is not only widely held in literature but also has some basis in history worthy of consideration. Benjamin Franklin, in "the Pit" in London is an example that readily springs to mind. Up until being charged with every bit of nonsense that could be conjured by his enemies in England, the famous and highly-influential "Doctor" Franklin was one of the Crown's best defenders and loyal subjects in the American colonies. If we may safely believe the account offered by our own historians such as H.W. Brands, it is this idiotic and petty act that sets Franklin against Parliament and aligned with the separatists who would become the Founding Fathers of the most prosperous and powerful nation that the world would ever know. [1]

For nearly as long as humans have had recorded history, we have had accounts of the struggles of the individuals against champions of mediocrity and those prejudiced by their own ignorance or stupidity. But the twentieth century, witness to more tyrannical attempts (and, worse, credible attempts) at world domination, seems to have produced more literature and discussion on the topic. Albert Einstein, probably the most famous scientist of the century, offered his own commentary on the matter: "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

From my personal experience, I can attest to the intense pressure placed upon those who dare to use their intellect even by well-meaning actors whose real crime is a repudiation of thought borne of a perverse notion of peace, as if refusal to acknowledge conflict is the same as "freedom from disquieting or oppressive thoughts or emotions." [2] In this twisted world, rather than providing the lowly the reason and means to improve themselves, the high-minded are cut down. Worse is that the cutters, these real-life Members of the Party of the Average Man will not understand the implications of what they're hoping to achieve, fail to discern how to achieve it, and spend a great deal of their limited time and energy working against those they need most to accomplish anything.

(Perhaps there is irrational fear of accomplishment, such that they will find themselves unneeded if successful. Like a road construction crew that knows it will be laid off when the job is done, such persons are not motivated to make progress but merely to look busy.)

The tragedy of Bend Sinister is that those who most need to learn its lesson and heed its implicit warning are the least likely to be bothered by "idle pursuits" like reading and the consideration of literature, no matter how artfully presented.

Footnotes:

[1] H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, Doubleday, 2000

[2] Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

In a fictitious European state now known as Padukgrad, lives the world-renowned philosopher Adam Krug. A new philosophy, known as `Ekwilism' has led the takeover of the state which is now being run by Paduk and his `Party of the Average Man'. Ekwilism discourages the idea of anyone being different from anyone else, and promotes the state as the prominent good in society. Naturally, equality and happiness for all does not require (or tolerate) individualism or freedom of thought. Adam Krug is grieving over the recent death of his wife and, at first, believes that there is no threat in Paduk's activities. After all, Krug knew Paduk at school where he once bullied Paduk and referred to him disparagingly as `the Toad'.

`Nothing can happen to Krug the Rock.'

But those who oppose Paduk's Ekwilist philosophy are being arrested, and this includes many of Krug's friends. Paduk attempts to persuade Krug to promote the state philosophy, but Krug refuses. When Krug's young son David is kidnapped, he capitulates and is prepared to promote Ekwilism in order to have David returned. Alas, there has been a mix-up, and the child returned to Adam Krug is not his son David. David has been accidentally tortured and killed. Krug is also killed, after being driven to madness by the realization that freedom of thought is no longer his once the person he cares for most in the world is killed.

`Individual lives are insecure; but we guarantee the immortality of the State.'

And the title, `Bend Sinister'? Nabokov wrote that: `This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world.'

It's not the story so much that held my attention in this novel as the way Nabokov structured it. The use of chess metaphors: a form of constrained movement and confrontation which sees the story finish in checkmate; the crossing of bridges; and reflections on the qualities of puddles each have a role in the narrative. In this novel, Nabokov has constructed and controls a dystopian society which he also extinguishes once he's finished with it.

`Twang. A good night for mothing.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

BEND SINISTER begins with Adam Krug, a famous philosopher, attempting to cross a bridge at night in a police state. That bridge, which is Krug's route from the hospital where his wife has just died to his apartment where his young son David waits for his Daddy, is guarded by soldiers, who are bungling, officious, and sinister as they review Krug's papers. While Nabokov adds many layers to this first disturbing scene, the dynamic of BEND SINISTER is set in chapter one. Stated as a question, this is: What happens in the interplay between a brilliant but aloof man, death and depression, love for an innocent child, and official incompetence and brutality?

Madness is an important element of BEND SINISTER. On one side, this emanates from the government where Paduk, its dictator, has used an ideology that celebrates mediocrity to create an arbitrary and brutal police state. On the other side, there is the slowly developing madness of Krug, whose character gradually evolves from uncompromising brilliance to a boyish recklessness, which has unintentionally cruel consequences.

As with other Nabokov books, the text is laced with brilliant precision that brings remarkable clarity and insight to the writing. At the same, this novel features Nabokov's odd overlap of humor and cruelty, which is also visible in Pnin (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) and Lolita. In this case, Nabokov endows the police with a quality of lustful silliness, as they torment and arrest their victims. This truly enriches the work, since the arrests in BEND SINISTER would otherwise only be displays of helpless panic and ruthlessness.

Highly recommended.

What happens when the country us taken over by the average man who is unsophisticated, uneducated and cares only for beastial appetites? A nightmare that would cause Kafka to lose sleep. Yet, these average and inept party officials running the show and trying to manipulate the life of the nations mosr prestigious and brilliant mind, are mearly a reflection of the baseness of that very mind as it muses upon the cruelty he inflicted in his childhood. With Nabokov, you never know what is real or imagined until the end and then you may ot be sure. This is a must read.