Customer Reviews

King Queen Knave

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Nabokov's second novel, his brightest and lightest of the lot, is regarded by some as being one of the weaker links in the author's ouvre.The plot here is pretty banal (a bland, country boy Franz falls in love with the wife of his rich uncle who lives in Berlin and before you know it Franz and his aunt are pathetically planning the murder of the middle-man). Nabokov pokes some fun at the story of Madame Bovary and offers somewhat of a parody. As usual though, the plot here takes backstage to the form and style of writing and Nabokov does not disappoint; the prose is beautiful and enchanting (minus some laughable sexual innuendos and so on) and makes the novel worth reading.While it's far from counting among Nabokov's strongest works, I still enjoyed the book and certain images have and will remain with me (especially the last couple of chapters, filled with the imagery of azure beaches and wide open skies). Nabokov does make an 'appearance' in the novel (a la Hitchcock), along with his wife, as the couple with whom Franz becomes somewhat obsessed at the seaside resort (look for mention of the butterfly net).This is a relatively light and accessible Nabokov read, recommended for shiny summer days.

Many think this is a lightweight novel, but it was one of Nabokov's favorite - according to the book jacket - and I agree with his choice. It is a bit similar to Laughter in the Dark, but more humorous. Most of the enjoyment with this book is the discovery of Nabokov's creation. Frankly, I suggest that you skip the reviews here, close your eyes for the moment and simply read the book - the same recommendation that I make for most of his books. Read the comments later.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899 to 1977) is a Russian born writer who went to Cambridge, then lived in western Europe, the US, and finally retired in Switzerland. He has a medium sized body of work with numerous novels, short works, and non-fiction. Most know him for his 1955 creation of Lolita, which he wrote and re-wrote for over twenty years before the final product. It was based on a real life French story, but set in America. He has 20 novels, and I have read about half.

Eleven of Nabokov's novels come from his early European period when he could write in many languages but he wrote his first 11 novels in Russian. This is from that period. It was his second novel and it was published in 1928 as a book, then translated years later.

The story is a love triangle set in Berlin. It is about the 34 year old wife of a 50 year old store owner, and the owner's young nephew. Beyond that, the reader can discover the plot.

It is a very humorous and entertaining a book. Having read many of his novels and most of his best sellers, I thought it was excellent and either a touch short of his best or among the best. It is a matter of taste, but I liked "King, Queen, Knave" and "Laughter in the Dark" as his best works, notwithstanding "Pale Fire" and "Lolita." That latter show more creativity as does "Transparent Things" - as do a few of his other works.

I think it is an excellent and an entertaining read. Some might not think it is among his best novels, but I liked it.

This is an entertaining novel about a love triangle. The only twist about the story is the end which turns out to be surprising and satisfying, but what makes this novel exceptional is Nabakov's beautiful prose style and capability for penetrating the depths of the character's thoughts with intense lyrical innovations. I don't think you are meant to like any of the characters, but consider them to be hard toys with which Nabakov can play his devilish word games.

Vladmir Nabakov may be the closest kin in the twentieth century to the magnificent imagination of "The one thousand and one Arabian Nights". Yet this is not entirely an apt comparison, for whereas the "Nights" was a framework in which the dreams were presented as a reality, Nabakov's is a strange world wherein the reality is painted as a lush, evanescent dream. But beware the reader, who thinks this mere clever wordplay, for to read Nabakov is to be entranced into a highly sophisticated web where life is as much a romantic dirge as a brilliant puzzle. King, Queen, Knave was by his own admission, "my gayest novel", and yet there is a kind of sadness here amidst the gaiety and superlative sequence of almost divine juxtapositions that I have only experienced from the likes of a virtuoso rendition of Paganini.
The basic story is a simple love triangle, a rich Uncle, a faux nephew and a cold aunt, and of course involves an illicit affair culminating in a murderous plot. And yet what is not simple is how Nabakov deftly draws these characters, at once ultra real and but also aloof, blatant caricatures of the human soul. Like a pack of playing cards, thinking themselves to be free, but fully boxed in. And it's quite amusingly funny, but Nabakov's humor springs from diverse and often mundane sources - the ambience, the shaggy dog, the inward blindness of his protagonists and situations involving the Uncle and the two lovers where the former is completely unaware that he is being cuckolded right under his canopy. Personally, though, what I find most delightful is the poetic details that N throws in gratuitously everywhere, e.g.- The time when Uncle Dreyer, who is the owner of a large Berlin Department store pays a surprise visit to his nephew and his cohorts who work in the sporting goods dept. And "An early customer, who wanted another ball for his dog, was ignored for an instant" or consider "an old sculptor whose work was so lifelike that he managed to convey the impression of acute chorea". The descriptions of the lovemaking are also highly erotic - but I won't quote from that, not to mention the brilliant morphing of scenes and persons. Enough said. This book is a veritable masterpiece and a highly entertaining one at that.
One final quote: "A baker in the encyclopedia who had poisoned an entire parish told the prison barber who was shaving his neck that never in his life had he slept so well".
And there is a wonderful twist even in the last paragraph.

I have read Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Effi Briest... and so it was with certain trepidation that I approached yet another novel dealing with the theme of adultery. But the twists and turns (and breathtaking close calls) in "King, Queen, Knave", along with the brilliant characterization of Martha Dreyer make this book unique and well worth looking into. An excellent story. I was most impressed with the way Nabokov layed bare the tattered edges of Franz's conscience in the latter third of the story. The only reason I did not give this book a perfect rating is because the very ending left me a bit bewildered. (Maybe the author intended this)? All in all, to think that Nabokov published this book when he was but 28 years old leaves me with only one word to describe his talent: GENIUS! Read it.

Nabokov got famous partly because, unlike most of his contemporaries, he went out of his way to remind his readers that his stories were untrue. That's now a very popular postmodern trick, and it's in operation right from the start of "King, Queen, Knave" - its well-known first line suggests that the story is little more than a wind-up toy. As a train carrying Franz, the Knave of the title, slowly moves out of the station, the description suggests that it's really standing still - rather, it's the station, the town, and the rest of the world that moves backwards.

Other such techniques abound throughout the novel, and it can be difficult to tell just what they add to the story, entertaining though they often are. So let's have a look at that story first. Maybe that will help.

The aforesaid Franz travels to Berlin for a job - it seems that his uncle, a wealthy department-store owner named Dreyer, met up with Franz's mother on his way home from a vacation with his wife and made the job offer without even meeting Franz. The younger man encounters uncle Dreyer and Dreyer's wife Martha on the train without realizing who they are and immediately conceives a towering desire for Martha. She's not at all displeased by this, actually. She's of a cool temperament, overwhelmingly concerned with social niceties, and finds her boisterous, life-loving husband utterly repulsive. So they all arrive in Berlin, come to realize their family relationship, and away we go.

Aside from the blood relationship between the characters in this triangle, you've come across this exact setup in loads of stories, from "The Postman Always Rings Twice" to "Body Heat" (not to mention the often-referenced "Madame Bovary"). It's nice and soapy, but not very compelling on its own. Maybe that's the function of all those postmodern tricks.

As best as I can tell, the trick in this novel that gets the most mention in the critical literature has to do with a group of mobile department-store mannequins. Dreyer gets a visit from the inventor of these objects, and the inventor builds three of them as a demonstration - one figure of an older man, one of a younger man, and one of a woman. You read what happens to the three of them during the demonstration, and you get a pretty good prediction of what's going to happen to Dreyer, Franz and Martha respectively. In most novels, giving your ending away like that is a big no-no, but remember that funny mechanical construction at the beginning of this book? If the characters in this love triangle are so predictable that a bunch of dressmaker's dummies can tell what's going to happen before the climax, what does that say about their various passions?

And sure enough, the longer this story goes on, the less convincing the three of them are about the love they supposedly feel. However, don't get the idea that the story is less interesting because the characters aren't emotionally involved in it. They are emotionally involved in something, believe me. Nabokov's just misdirecting your attention, like a true magician would.

You run across a few other postmodern misdirections, such as the fact that a local movie theater is getting ready to show a film called "King, Queen, Knave," and the appearance of Nabokov himself and his wife in the last two chapters. In his preface, Nabokov warned the psychological establishment (which he never liked and insisted upon referring to as "the Viennese delegation") that he had planted a few traps in his novel for them. I'm no expert, but I have a hunch that this novel was (among other things) Nabokov's way of insisting that sexual motives do not, in fact, run everything in life, as Freud seemed to believe.

Anyway, he informs us that this "bright brute" of a novel is the most colorful and merriest he ever wrote. That's an odd claim for a story of marital infidelity, betrayal and attempted murder, but it sort of works - he even went so far as to use the word "pretty" almost every other page. Which only goes to show how playful Nabokov could be. As I've said before, the details of his biography can make him appear quite a dilettante - he was born into privilege and never seemed to lose the sense that the world was a toy - but you dig a little deeper and find that he actually had an enormous compassion for people. That lightness of touch allowed him to show his characters' inner lives without passing judgment on them. That's actually very respectful.

It also allowed him to see his characters much more clearly than most authors could. Wait until you find out who the actual hero of "King, Queen, Knave" is. It's certainly not Martha, who at one point has her dog put down for the sake of her own convenience, and seems determined to play the same low trick on her husband, that great, expansive lover of life. Although Nabokov seldom based his novels on his own biography, he too seems to have been a great lover of life, with his long loving marriage and his great butterfly-hunting adventures. He was quiet about his love of life, but it's there, all right.

Benshlomo says, If life is a game, at least play it well.

the attraction of this book is the sense of things to come with regards to the author's future books. whereas "mary", nabokov's first novel, emits a warm autobiographic glow, "king, queen, knave" does an about face to depict a world utterly distant and alien from the author's personal milieux. the result is an abstract world not quite as pure and fantastic as the one created in "lolita", indeed the former pales greatly by comparison, but an abstract world which is nonetheless plausible and artistically pleasing. there are two unforgettable images in this novel. one adumbrates nabokov's penchant for condemning cruelty by having his characters indulge in it, that very cruelty, with inexcusable zest and relish; while the other gives us a taste of the author's wicked sense of humor. they are: marthe's repeated beatings and/or chastisements of tom, the family dog, and the pathetic fate of the monkey, a gift for marthe from dreyer before their marriage, which burns itself trying to light a match. these two images, which are patented nabokov, are just the tip of the iceberg in a body of work abrim with unforgettable images.

This is the only Nabokov novel I have read, but it sticks in my mind as sensual and tragic... definitely reminiscent of Shakespeare.

"The Graduate" also comes to mind.

Nabokov's descriptive detail puts the reader into the rented room of the nephew, where the first sexual encounter takes place. He doesn't romanticize - he tells everything exactly like it "is" & makes it extremely real.

Very suspenseful at the end, although I see the description on this site reveals the entire ending, so it ruins it for any potential readers!

So don't read that, just read the book. It evoked strong emotion in me, suffering with the characters' situations, frustrations, and desires.

Often considered the greatest writer of the 20th Century (well, to everyone except those on the Nobel committee), Nabokov was a master in his ability to wrap language with a lyricism that created prose that seems to flow off the page. If he wasn't born with this skill, Nabokov sure developed it early, as is evidenced in KING, QUEEN, KNAVE, only his second novel. It is as beautifully written as the other books of his I have read.

As KING, QUEEN, KNAVE is more humorous than many of Nabokov's other books, there is a tendency to not take it quite as seriously. I think that is a mistake. The book is a wonderful read. That it has a more amusing undertone than some of his others demonstrates not a less serious book, but that Nabokov had such control over his literary talents that they shone through on the lighter material as well as they did on the heavier.

A young man goes to Berlin to try to get a job with his successful uncle. He is more successful, though, in the bedroom with his aunt! Their plans to kill the old man and live off his riches go awry, in that ironic sort of way that makes you realize that the author was as much a master of plot as he was of prose.

Easy to see as merely a bizarre love triangle, KING, QUEEN, KNAVE is better seen through the prism of Nabokov's well known dislike, actually more like contempt, of the theories of Sigmund Freud. The heart of psychoanalytic thought, after all, is the young man's sexual desire for his mother and competition with his father for her affections. The relations may be a touch more distant, but the characters in this novel seem to be acting out a warped vision of the Oedipus complex, mocking Freud while creating a good story to boot.

This was Nabokov's second novel, published when he was a mere 28 years old. Thirty-nine years later, after writing so many other fabulous books he said of King, Queen, Knave "of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest." By this he meant that he enjoyed contemplating its "rapturous composition" and reminiscing of how the idea for it first came to him on the coastal sands of Pomerania. The book maintained a special place in his heart. The theme is in many ways similar to Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, as Nabokov himself admits in the Foreword to the revised English version. I love those other books dearly, but Nabokov's contains several twists and turns that are even more dramatic and less likely for the reader to detect ahead of time than either of those other classic husband/wife/paramour triangle stories.

The setting here is Berlin in the 1920's. The young, unsophisticated Franz arrives on the doorstep of his rich uncle Dreyer with hopes of securing a job in his department store. He gets the job and repays Dreyer's magnanimity by falling for his beautiful wife Martha. (Franz's aunt? Hello!) Martha's seduction of Franz seems to be motivated by something at least bordering on pure boredom, but at any rate, the triangle is set. Dreyer, oblivious to this development, plods on with his money-making schemes and inventions/diversions. Martha, in a departure from the more suicidal natures of Anna K. or Emma B. decides rather to begin clumsily plotting her husband's death so that she and Franz will be able to live happily ever after on his money. But things are not so easy in anything Nabokovian are they? Well, things don't work out the way they're supposed to here either, and that's all I will say. Far be it from me to unravel a rope the Nabokov has so skillfully stretched tight. By the end of this story Franz's conscience lies in tatters, and Martha is _____!

The only reason I don't give the book a perfect 5 stars is because the very ending left me a tad bewildered. I attribute that to a fault in my reading of it and trust that you, being much sharper than I, will rate your experience with King, Queen, Knave a star higher than I did.