Rating: 
Summary: He Wrote About What He Knew
Review: V. Nabokov was a genius who wrote like an angel (but he was aware of both traits). I'm always impressed with his playful and total command of English, slang and all. This novel, about a chess genius, is one of his earliest. I'll happily turn to all the rest, having previously read only "Lolita" and "Pnin."
Luzhin, the hapless grandmaster born before World War I, has no inner life. He hides from people on all social occasions, dresses in rags, and lives a reclusive existence until an unnamed Russian expatriate in Paris takes pity on him and marries him over her parents' objections. The modern reader naturally thinks of Bobby Fischer with his antisocial behavior and tantrums, but Luzhin is more tortured, and actually has a psychotic break at the point of adjournment of his world championship match with an Italian challenger who favored hypermodern flank openings (perhaps modeled after Richard Reti, another player of the 1920s whose achievements were cut short by an early death).
Nabokov not only played chess, but composed "retrograde" problems of the most difficult kind, in which the solution requires proof of the move that must have preceded the position shown in the diagram. His description of Luzhin's hallucinations is harrowing, but his shimmering vocabulary and sentence structure puts him at the top of his craft as a writer. One of the most remarkable things about Nabokov was his brilliant, penetrating, power of observation. A few examples:
"That special snow of oblivion, abundant and soundless snow, covered his recollection with an opaque white mist."
"...and his wife's voice persuading the silence to drink a cup of cocoa."
"He became engrossed in the fantastical misbehavior of numbers and the wayward frolics of geometric lines....He lingered long in those heavens where earthly lines go out of their mind."
"[Chess] combinations [are] like melodies. You know, I simply hear the moves."
"The urns that stood on the stone pedestals at the four corners of the terrace threatened one another across their diagonals."
"Maples were casting their lively shade."
"The typewriter, whose keys were all watching him with their pupils of reflected light..."
"A half-opened drawer from which, snake-like, a green red-spotted tie came crawling."
"The modern urge to set senseless records..."
"Not once did he attempt to support a collapsing conversation."
"He looked at the moon, which was tremblingly disengaging itself from some black foliage."
"A village girl was eating an apple and her black shadow on the fence was eating a slightly larger apple."
[Champagne bottle] "A bucket with a gold-knobbed glass Pawn sticking out of it."
"The tailor jabbed pins into him, which he took with astonishing deftness from his mouth, where they seemed to grow naturally."
"A burst of military music approached in orange waves."
"A bookcase crowned with a broad-shouldered, sharp-faced Dante in a bathing cap."
"A candle whose flame darted about, maddened at being carried out of the warm church into the unknown darkness, and finally died of a heart attack at the corner of the street where a gust of wind bore down from the Neva."
"Chairs moved with the sounds of throats being cleared.
"[As the cab moved] the soft shadow made by his nose circled slowly over his cheek and then his lip, and again it was dark until another light went by."
"In the entrance hall hung a condemned jacket."
"Attendants were accepting things and carrying them away like sleeping children."
"Someone closed the door so the music would not catch cold."
"The helpless mercury, under the influence of its surroundings, fell ever lower and lower."
"The bedroom was adorned by a bas-relief done in charcoal and a confidential conversation
between a cone and a pyramid."
"The most unexpected places were invaded in the mornings by the snout of the rapacious vacuum cleaner. It is difficult, difficult to hide a thing: the other things are jealous and do not allow a homeless object escaping pursuit, into a single cranny."
An amazing masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: Effectively creepy prose, weak plot
Review: This brief character study succeeds admirably in two main areas. Masterful prose which you'd expect of Nabokov who writes with a seemingly effortless lyricism to evoke the drab, stark life and surroundings of Luzhin and the development, or lack thereof, of Luzhin. Combined these create an effective, creepy tale of obsession and self-destruction when one views life as a zero-sum game.
However, I read primarily for plot and there isn't so much here. The main plot is actually the setup for Luzhin's endgame. Once Luzhin has his incident in the middle of the book it is effectively over. Like a chess endgame, the outcome is known, as are the moves, they are just played out to the inevitable conclusion.
One other interesting portion to the book was the study of alienation. Obviously Luzhin's alienation to the entire world, but also the alienation of Russian ex-pats to the western world as well as to their newly communist homeland and also Luzhin's wife has alienation issues with her parents which may have caused her to marry him.
Rating:
Summary: Dancing on the edge of madness
Review: " .. that place where parallel lines go out of their mind and intersect."This is my favorite work by Nabokov - I first encountered this in a course entitled "The Irrational in Russian Literature." To see how extreme rationality (quote unquote) becomes madness and nonreason --> it is akin to the bureaucratic "reasons" and regulations in Kafka's Castle or the supposed laws that reigned king in the U.S.S.R. (The Man in the Black Coat, Cancer Ward, etc.) Anything taken to ^infinite degree ceases to remain a reflection of itself; Nabokov's depiction of extreme rationality toppling into utter madness is genius. (See also Notes from Underground.)
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Summary: The Collected Games of Vladimir Nabokov
Review: As with other Nabokov novels, 'The Defence' is primarily about Nabokov himself; certainly not in terms of biographical detail, but as a vehicle for his own obsessive translation of the world into prose. His literary skill is quite overwhelming, in both a positive and negative sense, and one wonders whether he, the medium of this skill, was as thrilled and burdened by it as his 'creature' Luzhin was by a comparable skill in chess.
*
While in some books the characters are memorable, or a turn in the plot is key, or an entire fictional world is born, here the book itself, as an object, as a construction of words, dominates proceedings. Words swarm over every detail recounted in the book, at once transforming the mundane into something precious and, at times, obscuring the distinction bewteen what is important and what trivial - the same skill is devoted to describing a bearskin as to describing a marriage; it is probably no accident that John Updike provides an afterword to some editions, since his work is blessed with the same heavy burden.
*
The character of Luzhin is largely viewed from the exterior. His interior world, when approached, is still seen from one remove - we do not so much share Luzhin's mind's eye as peer over his shoulder. What we do know of his interior is minimal, not through lack of access but in virtue of lack of content - he is largely bereft of normal human emotion. His fear of the world is very much an amorphous angst. His aspirations are free-standing and without worldly motivation. He is, in many ways, not a character at all. The same could be said of the girl whom he courts, and who, in a virtuouso display, remains anonymous for the entire novel, starting off as a semi-circular black silk handbag (with a faulty Freudian clasp), developing into a personal pronoun, then a fiancee and so on. These may as well be pieces upon a chessboard.
*
And indeed they are. In his foreword, Nabokov is excited by the structure of the novel, in particular its relation to a chess game. While for mine the analogy is strained, he at least declares the lie of the novel's appeal.
*
Finally, if you approach the novel through the hope of finding an actual discussion of the game of chess, you will leave disappointed save for imagistic accounts and metaphors, often musical, with few or no moves given. There is a film version but, sadly, the director makes the unfortunate mistake of thinking this to be a work of social realism, and the result is cinematic effluent.
*
Treated less as a novel and more as a testament of Nabokov's linguistic prowess, 'The Defence' succeeds, and affords pleasure in a way analagous to that afforded by a spectacular game by Kasparov, or Tal, or Alekhine, or any of a number of other Russians.
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Summary: One of my Favorite books. A Masterpiece.
Review: I become compulsive when read Nabokov. I cannot stop reading him. His language is superb. I loved the ending, sudden and mysteriously prophetic for all of us. What a mind games we play. Check & mate to all of us.:)
Rating:
Summary: The prose of madness
Review: The back cover of this book proclaims that it is "a chilling tale of obsession and madness." After I had finished the book, I thought this a laughable statement. There had been almost nothing frightening or chilling about it. A few seconds later, I stepped back and reevaluated what had actually happened in the book. A certain sentence in (I believe, though I could be wrong) the third-to-last paragraph hit me with a strong retroactive spook. I consider that moment one of the finest moments of literary appreciation I have recently experienced. The reason it happened is that I had effectively become Luzhin. What he was thinking made perfect sense. The plot was in no way disturbing. Luzhin was perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. Except, of course, he wasn't. Nabokov leads the reader into Luzhin's head remarkably smoothly and successfilly. This book was the first I read by Nabokov. Since I have not yet completed another, I can't say how it compares with his other books, but I can recommend it. One caveat: don't read Nabokov's introduction until after you finish the novel. there are a couple of reasons for this, which will become apparent when you do read it.
Rating:
Summary: The prose of madness
Review: The back cover of this book proclaims that it is "a chilling tale of obsession and madness." After I had finished the book, I thought this a laughable statement. There had been almost nothing frightening or chilling about it. A few seconds later, I stepped back and reevaluated what had actually happened in the book. A certain sentence in (I believe, though I could be wrong) the third-to-last paragraph hit me with a strong retroactive spook. I consider that moment one of the finest moments of literary appreciation I have recently experienced. The reason it happened is that I had effectively become Luzhin. What he was thinking made perfect sense. The plot was in no way disturbing. Luzhin was perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. Except, of course, he wasn't. Nabokov leads the reader into Luzhin's head remarkably smoothly and successfilly. This book was the first I read by Nabokov. Since I have not yet completed another, I can't say how it compares with his other books, but I can recommend it. One caveat: don't read Nabokov's introduction until after you finish the novel. there are a couple of reasons for this, which will become apparent when you do read it.
Rating:
Summary: Luzhin the lovable?
Review: The correct title is The Luzhin Defence, referring to a chess manoeuvre; the shortened title culpably fails to convey this, and is as reprehensible as The Ogre for Tournier's The Erl-King, or Magister Ludi for Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. According to Nabokov in his trademark snooty introduction, the protagonist "has been found lovable even by those who know nothing about chess and/or detest all my other books". I know next to nothing about chess and dislike only one of Nabokov's other books among the half-dozen or so I have read (Bend Sinister it was), so perhaps I may be forgiven for finding Luzhin merely amusing. From the very beginning, in his lovingly detailed childhood of the first four chapters, he's an almost completely hopeless creature - sullen, overweight, patronised and overborne not only by those around him - his parents, his "chess father" Valentinov, his wife - but also, most especially and exquisitely, by his Olympian and stratosphere-nosed creator. The only thing that inspires him is chess, the abstract joys of which account for some of the best descriptive passages in what Nabokov justifiably refers to as "this attractive novel". Even those of us who are ignorant of everything but the colours and the pieces can enjoy the recurrence of black and white squares, the weird little Knight Moves of plot or gesture, and the verve and dexterity of Nabokov's prose. This was his third novel, written in Berlin, 1929, and Russian; translated by Michael Scammell and the author, it shows Nabokov starting to scintillate. Except for the final few pages, the last couple of chapters are a bit of a letdown, as Nabokov slackens the plot and indulges in some crude and unnecessary Bolshevik-baiting ("I am not satirical," he declares elsewhere; quite true, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have stopped him from trying now and then); but for the most part this is a magnificent frolic.
Rating:
Summary: A towering novel !
Review: The master Vladimir Nabokov approach about a chess player are told brilliantly inside an introspetive mood filled with emotional tension .
Widely recommendable .
Rating:
Summary: Luzhin to White Square
Review: This early Nabokov book was written during his Kafka influenced phase. Also in this group I would put Invitation To a Beheading. I described this book to a group of friends one day as "a book about a chess master who slowly loses his identity to the game until the final page when he imagines the open bathroom window is one of the white spaces on the chess board and it is his move." Its not a novel for everyone but if you like Kafka and his peculiar worlds this will appeal to you. Also recommended to the perhaps new to Nabokov reader are his short stories, especially one called "Cloud, Castle Lake" written in 1937 about a sensitive youth Vasili who does not much care for the world the Nazis are trying to create and decides he does not have "the strength to belong to mankind any longer." And so Nabokov the author says,"Of course, I let him go." Nabokov's fictions are strange but appealing. Using chess as an analogy for life in the Defense Nabokov creates a claustrophobic environment as there are only so many possible moves and that number is diminished with each move. The Defense's Luzhin is a very sensitive youth like Vasily in the short story and like so many of Nabokov's creations they are trapped in a world of someone elses devising, trying to get out. Like Kafka's heroes Nabokov's early heroes are victims of something too big for them to come to grips with. A sad theme with perhaps very few solutions but even in the trap very interesting human qualities abound.
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