transparent_things epitome of incomprehensibility I finished this, and wrote a blurb in my little green notebook about it weeks ago - why am I slow in extracting the syrup from the faintly sweet water of lined pages? So - Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov. It isn't the twisted (in many senses) work of characterization and irony that is Lolita, but it's shorter. I am lazy and I like short books. It does at least two things that are interesting. For one, the narrator. The narrator isn't really a person in the story, but he does have a voice, and he likes to fixate on the objects in the story. Figurines and pencils have stories too, and often the passages on things have the best lines. Take this sentence, where the main character is impatiently watching his clumsy father fold an umbrella: "The scorn was unmerited since lots of things exist, from live cells to dead stars, that undergo now and then accidental little mishaps at the not always able or careful hands of anonymous shapers" (10). And that in the context of umbrellas! Reading on, this book wasn't quite what I'd though it'd be. The first pages led me to believe I was diving into something experimental and rebellious, where the anonymous narrator would keep pulling away from the character-driven story to describe things, to resist the compulsion to tell the main story. And that would've been cool. But the narrator doesn't really do that. What he/she/it does is see through people the same way it/she/he sees through objects, and it's this that ties the seemingly warring strands of description ("things") and mystery-type narrative together. Because it does unfold like a mystery novel. Someone dies in mysterious circumstances and things (things? transparent things?) are told in flashbacks. The narrator fixes on a main character, Hugh Person - like "you person": the book has some fun with this - who seems like an ordinary, rather awkward guy who gets unmeshed in an unusual story. Allusion doesn't seem to be the main point. This isn't James Joyce we're talking about. But there's a rather disturbing scene where Hugh's accidentally turned on by a photo album his girlfriend's mother took of said girlfriend as a girl - with pictures of her still naked at age ten. Since Nabokov wrote this, it's also quite funny, and it gives me a Profound Thought, which will be expressed within parentheses: (Would I be turned on by looking at romantic interests as naked ten-year-olds? Surely not. Their facial features would be merely cute, not mature, and any naughty bits would simply not be naughty enough yet. But it does strike me that as perverse, in an abstract way, when I asked a certain Austrian so many questions about his childhood. It's as if you want to insinuate yourself in their life retroactively. Possessive. Greedy. You are attracted to difference, but you want it to turn into familiarity. And of course by "you" I mean me.) But by alluding to his other novel Lolita (which the book does more specifically in another scene, in reference to an imaginary book that Hugh Person is proofreading) the Nabokov-narrator gives another angle on Lolita's narrator: if he were seen from the outside, instead of the inside with his brilliant interior monologues, he might be, well, a rather boring person. A boring pedophile? Yes, why not? Just as Lolita herself is a rather ordinary girl (something Humbert overlooks by imagining her superlatively as either victim or vixen (she is the former, but for goober's sake she's meant to be human as well)) so he can be a You Person. And I can write long sentences with embedded parentheses. So it goes. But back to the actual book I said I was writing about, here's another object-related sentence: "Spatial disarrangement and dislocation have always their droll side, and few things are funnier than three pairs of trousers tangling in a frozen dance on the floor - brown slacks, blue jeans, old pants of grey flannel" (14). You might not guess something terrible has happened. Then again, you might. ... On to the physical object of the book. I'll totally MLA-format its specs. Like totally. Like, Nabokov, Vladimir. Transparent Things. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. For realsies. Yes, this is an old edition. The cover is silver-grey, with the author's name in big black font and the title in slightly less big red font. Black font, smaller again, tells us it's "A New Novel by the Author of LOLITA and ADA" capitalized just like that, and the inside left bookflap says that "TRANSPARENT THINGS is Vladimir Nabokov's first new work since the publication of ADA in 1969." You can tell it's old because it was new. Funny how that is. And the book might be, right now, sitting on a shelf in the dark and closed Bibliothèque de Dorval/Dorval Library. (In this place, we appease the Ghost of Quebec Past with offerings of our firstborn French words.) 131126 ... e_o_i I feel like I've misrepresented this slightly. Not everything is told in flashbacks. It goes backward and forward in time a bit, but not as much as, say, Slaughterhouse_Five or A Complicated Kindness. 131126 ... e_o_i I also feel like composing rap verse in which I diss somebody by asserting: "You're just a knockoff Vladimir Nabokov." I guess that's a sign that I need sleep. 131126 ... raze but no! it's a sign that you should be writing rap songs! here, i'll help. you're just a knockoff vladimir nabokov pray for mother russia no one's gonna touch ya 131126 ... e_o_i Yes! That made me laugh. It also reminded me that I'm mad at the Russian government right now. Being contrary in order to spite the US might have led them to shelter Edward Snowden (haven't checked up on that story lately) but these anti-gay laws are not helping anybody. Grrr. Your conservative elements are not so different, I mean yours and the U.S.'s, Vladimir Putin. Maybe I should write an angry rap about Vladimir Putin? But I can't call him a knockoff Vladimir Nabokov, first names notwithstanding. That would be nonsensical, and as you know, I'm never nonsensical. 131127 ... e_o_i (And evidently I cannot decide when to put dots between things. My minimalist side favours no dots. US. And then if someone asks in capital letters ARE YOU WITH US OR AGAINST US? I can answer, Neither, I'm Canadian. 131127 ... e_o_i ...end bracket!) 131127 ... raze i didn't know anything about the state of LGBT rights in russia, but i'm reading about it right now. homosexuality was classified as a "mental illness" until 1999? MENTAL ILLNESS? according to wikipedia, "there are currently no laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity and expression, and households headed by same-sex couples are ineligible for the legal protections available to opposite-sex couples." that is so insanely wrong, i don't even know what to say about it. my head is exploding. 131127 ... e_o_i The specific thing that made me angry was a recent law from Putin's government banning "gay propaganda to minors" - with the effect that gay people are arrested, silenced, etc. This happened a while ago, but it's getting more coverage since the winter Olympics are happening there - there's a short, if somewhat vague article at care2: http://www.care2.com/causes/putin-seems-to-think-russia-is-welcoming-for-gay-people.html I don't want to put words into dead people's mouths, but I'll wager Vladimir Nabokov would not approve. 131128 what's it to you? who go blather from