Vladimir Nabokov

Mary is a gripping tale of youth, first love, and nostalgia--Nabokov's first novel. In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia.

Mary

akshita

"when music plays at the very moment when one is doing something quite ordinary, such as walking from a table to pay at the bar, and gives an inward dancelike quality to one’s simple movement, transforming it into a significant and immortal gesture."

"The wallpaper was white with bluish roses. Sometimes, in semidelirium, one would fashion people’s profiles out of these roses or wander up and down with one’s eyes, trying not to touch a single flower or a single leaf on the way, finding gaps in the pattern, wriggling through, doubling back, landing in a blind alley and starting one’s journey through the luminous maze all over again."

"In those first days of love-making they kissed so much that Mary’s lips grew swollen, and her neck, so warm under her hair-bow, bore tender vampire marks. She was an amazingly cheerful girl, who laughed not so much from mockery as from sheer humor. She loved jingles, catchwords, puns and poems. A song would stick in her head for two or three days, then it would be forgotten and a new one would take possession."

Mary quotes

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