Nabokov, Vladimir

New York. 1968. March 1968. Pocket Books. 1st Pocket Books Paperback Edition. Good in Slightly Worn Wrappers. 178 pages. paperback. 75258. keywords: Literature Russia America. FROM THE PUBLISHER - An electrifying novel by the author John Updike has called ‘. the best writer of English prose at present holding American Citizenship,' DESPAIR is the sardonic story of a man who undertakes the perfect crime-his own murder. DESPAIR'S protagonist, Hermann, is another masterly portrait in the fascinating gallery of living characters Vladimir Nabokov has given to world literature. In his pseudo worldliness, his odd genius, Hermann is one with such other heteroclitic neurotic Nabokovian creations as Humbert Humbert and Charles Kinbote. Rapt in his own reality, incapable of escaping or explicating it, he is as solitary in his abyss as Luzhin or Charlotte Haze of Lolita. Illuminated throughout by the virtuosity and cunning wit that are Vladimir Nabokov's hallmarks, bearing abundant evidence of the combination of precision of language with incision of thought, DESPAIR is additional proof of the fact that Nabokov not only towers above contemporary authors but that his work, as August Derleth has written, ‘is of a piece with the great fiction of the time past rather than with the merely temporary fiction touted by the professional critics today.' Yet the ultimate test of DESPAIR as, indeed, of its author, lies in the fact that once one picks up the novel, the critics' words fade away and the reader comes face to face with the author in his characters and his story. It is a fascinating, and memorable, experience. inventory #47931