Владимир Владимирович Набоков

After being humiliated by her husband, Smurov commits suicide, only to experience even greater embarrassment in the afterlife.

The Eye

maariyah 

Christina Hufford

** spoiler alert **
           I just finished The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov. I COULD NOT RECOMMEND IT ENOUGH. 

First of all, though, something really irked me: mainly, the back cover's description:

Smurov, a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin, commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the after-life as he searches for proof of his existence among fellow émigrés who are too distracted to pay him any heed.

Yeah ... THAT'S ONLY VAGUELY TO DO WITH THE PLOT AND IS REALLY MISLEADING. Not only are you not supposed to know Smurov and the narrator are the same character until well into the novel, but the suicide is metaphorical! Or not metaphorical, but, it fails, only he thinks it succeeds, rather would LIKE to think it succeeded, so he can continue living his life as though he were dead, and in that a free observer and so truly happy, because in that way he'd be truly untouched. He doesn't want proof of his own existence, he wants proof of his non-existence. Anyway, that really threw me off, having read that and then diving into the novel and after a few pages thinking "wait ... that doesn't quite fit..."

Anyway, I loved this. It's less than a hundred pages, but took me several days, as Nabokov's writing's economical, in that every sentence matters and is worth spending time on. There were so many little things that were so awesome, and these are my favorites:

1. The narrator gets the shit beaten out of him by the husband of the woman he's been sleeping with; this happens in front of his two pupils he tutors, and as he's being chased through the house and beaten, the pupils follow the men to watch, even obligingly turning on the light when the fight stumbles into a darkened dining room.

2. The idea of the number of perspectives that make up a person, like a hundred different shards of mirror pieced together; we are not just us as we exist in our own heads and lives, but, the more people we interact with, the more people's opinions of us create these different perceptions that all come together to create something that's very disjointed and perhaps not wholly accurate, but is us in the sense of it being a conglomeration of everything we've put out into the world. So sifting through all that rumor and opinion and fantasy to who the real person is can be a difficult (if rewarding) task -- It's a really interesting concept, especially to be explored so thoroughly in such a short novel.

3. I really, really loved the left-field climax where Smurov steals the letter to read what Bogdanovich thinks of him, and the letter's contents are basically the eloquent Russian literature equivalent of Pierce Hawthorne in the Cookie Crisp Wizard's suit reading Jeff Winger's mind and yelling "GAY. GAY. IT'S SO GAY." 

4. And also, when the guy who beat the shit out of him saw him later on the street, Smurov just like GIGGLED INTO HIS FLOWERS? THAT WAS SO ENDEARING AND WEIRD.

The Eye

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