Name: Despair
Rating: 3.928571428571428 (21 reviews)
ISBN: 9780679723431

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Nabokov delves into the mind of a man obsessed with the idea of making his own murder a perfect crime

A Novel

Despair

Safiya 

I have heard extensively about the author, and his praise not only once was brought up whenever I mentioned Russian Literature. The natural unfolding of my review now has already begun with an expectation, if not the prophecy of my friends as Nabokov is - according to them- a brilliant author, at least I would know what the fuss is all about?
If I haven't spoiled the plot for myself I don't think I would've carried through.. Although if it was trimmed and put in shape as a "classic" would have been, mind you a classic is a thoroughly worked writing that helps the reader turn its pages at a moderate speed (not the bestsellers type, where the plot and all are some joke of cocotte minute), it can turn out to be the legitimate heir of the Russian tragedies, but it is not. It was a novel with a mauvais goût... Granted that it was revised repeatedly, I haven't sensed the effort... I mentioned postmodernism earlier in my reading updates, and that amounts to the incredulous need for postmoderns to post the intimate details there naked for everyone to see about the process of the writing and so on... 
By the end of the book, I tried to see a metaphor in the novel, and that has made all the difference for the rating. This novel if taken as a flat novel with all of the disturbing details and unnecessary paragraphs can be a flop Russian book...The layer underneath depends on the reader's imagination, a good starting point can be a directed critique to the URSS, since as the Wikipedia page says it was banned by the authorities then... 
The plot is however closer to the imaginary Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas than the Double by Dostoïevski...

Vladimir Nabokov

Self-satisfied, delighting in the many fascinating quirks of his own personality, Hermann Hermann is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. But then a chance meeting with a man he believes to be his double reveals a frightening 'split' in Hermann's nature. With shattering immediacy, Nabokov takes us into a deranged world, one full of an impudent, startling humour, dominated by the egotistical and scornful figure of a murderer who thinks himself an artist.

Spencer T

baikalsturgeon

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965--thirty years after its original publication--Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder.

Despair A Novel

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