Look At The Harlequins! [Unknown Binding]

Vladimir Nabokov (Author)

Product Details

• Unknown Binding
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1st edition. edition (1974)
• ASIN: B001KUDANS
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,897,778 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri. Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing ficticvbn ral books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A late beauty from the crusty sage of Montreux, April 23, 2000

By 

"lexo-2x" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Look at the Harlequins! (Paperback)

Assuming that you haven't read LATH, how to describe it? It's a fake sort-of memoir by the Russian emigre writer Vadim Vadimovich, the general shape of whose career bears more than a slight resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, with one important caveat; Nabokov was a famously happy and contented man (at least according to official versions of his life story), but Vadim is a cranky, impatient, cantankerous whinger. He thrashes his way through his basically unhappy life, turning out the odd book now and again and suffering rather than enjoying the occasional love affair, before finally finding peace with a radiant angel referred to simply as You - the book is cast as a long love letter to the supposed author's last love. Nabokov has good fun with the kind of critic who assumed in the wake of Lolita that he himself lusted after young girls (Vadim has a thing going with his own daughter, at one point); literary in-jokes aside, it's a remarkable study of a bitter and thwarted man from an author who was so supremely good at rendering happiness. Clearly, however free from demons Nabokov was, he was able to imagine what it would be like to be in their clutches. Not many writers do so well in their seventies.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Look At the Harlequins! is an intricate house of mirrors., January 28, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Look at the Harlequins! (Paperback)

Readers of much Nabokov should save this treat for last; this supposed autobiography by one "Vadim Vadimovich N." is a house of mirrors--is the main character really Nabokov? Or is he just someone with whom Nabokov is constantly embodied or misrepresented? Funny, witty, amazing--Look at the Harlequins! is material that plays with the jokes of Nabokov novels past, and rewards Nabokov fans with cameos by Lolita, Sebastian Knight, and many more. A must-read

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Futility or triumph of fiction?, January 13, 2000

By 

Randall Froeschle - See all my reviews

This review is from: Look at the Harlequins! (Paperback)

Nabokov can tear your brain apart with narrative. In nearly all of his works, and especially in Lolita and Pale Fire, he invites the reader to examine every word as a piece of the narrator, always insisting, "This is not me, and if you think it is, you're a dolt." What, then, are his determined doters supposed to think when finally confronted with Vadim Vadimovich, emigre-novelist, almost self-aware deranged fictional character, and butterfly-hater? God only knows.

Obviously, he's not Vladimir Vladimirovich. He's something else. Maybe he is meant to be an inevitable distortion of Nabokov, but even that's questionable, as is everything in Nabokov's fiction.

Here's a thought. Perhaps, as is (almost) evident in Transparent Things, Nabokov eventually became so intrigued by the idea of networks of perspectives in fiction (the perspective of the narrator interacting with that of the reader, and maybe just a tittle of his own), that he couldn't resist the idea of writing a novel from the perspective of a fictional fictional Nabokov.

All fiction can be compared to the reflection of a painting in a puddle. Nabokov teaches us that the aesthetics of the puddle's ripples, manipulated by the right hands, can be as (nay, more!) breathtaking than those of the picture itself.