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40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stop plucking your nose hairs and read this book, September 20, 2000
"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.
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