Customer Reviews

Details of a Sunset and Other Stories

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I think it's a shame the 'Collected Stories', with its dull chronological order and unimaginative completeness, has come to supersede the four volumes specially prepared by Nabokov in the 1970s, which were, as his son and co-translator Dmitri says, 'painstakingly assorted and orchestrated by Nabokov using various criteria - theme, period, atmosphere, uniformity and variety'. the stories were translated with these volumes in mind, and to break up their order is to risk destroying Nabokov's carefully calculated voice.

The stories in 'Details of a Sunset', written between 1924 and 1935, mostly centre on the Russian emigre experience in Berlin Nabokov himself was living, as he struggled to write his first novels. It is a world of pale, starving writers, small, shabby rooms, dark, streetlamp-lit streets, jerky trams; a world in which present love affairs are bleak and deadly, and ideal ones are ruptured by misunderstanding or death; where reunions with lost family members are painfully inopportune.

this could all sound oppressively glum; what makes these stories sparkle is Nabokov's aggressively alert consciousness, his ability to literally light up the dreary by illuminating tiny, irrelevant details that combine to create magical tableaux - a focus on the material that produces an exciting spiritual rush.

Two stories here, 'A Bad Day' and 'Orache', would be later reworked in Nabokov's miraculous memoir 'Speak, Memory', and already the Russian's charged nostalgia exerts a magnetic pull. 'A Busy Man' is a little masterpiece about a hack writer who half-recollects the recollection of a childhood dream that may or may not have foretold his death on his 33rd birthday; 'A slice of life' is a sordid fait diver shot through with sympathy (and a rare excursion by the author into female first person narrative). 'A Guide to Berlin' is possibly the best story he wrote, a cartography not of famous landmarks, but the more hauntingly insistent humdrum - pipes waiting by the road to be dug in; dancing in a cafe; a huge tear on an actress' face in the cinema.