The Defense (Vintage International)

Rating:
Summary: you can't go wrong with Nabokov and Chess
Review: This early Nabokov novel is not of the mindbending genius of later works like Pale Fire and Lolita, but it is still better than even the best work by many other writers.

Nabokov is a brilliant stylist and imagines the world of his protagonist brillantly. The phrasing is sparse and compelling, but as the main character's mind starts to disintegrate, so does the book. The last third is a bit of a disppotment. A disappointment only because its a nabokov novel, and I've come to expect such great things for him. Its worth the time, especially if you have an interest in chess, but I'd read his later works first.

Rating:
Summary: The Fine Line Between Genius and Madness
Review: This is a brilliant examination of that uncertain territory that men of genius often live in. The only criticim I can find for this novel is that the main character Luzhin is so detached from reality even at an early age that it is difficult to understand or empathize with him. Also the latter parts of the novel where Luzhin's decent into madness is described lagely from Luzhin's own thoughts and actions are dfficult to follow and understand. still this is definately worth a read and far above most of what passes for literature these days.

Rating:
Summary: Checkmate in Fourteen Chapters
Review: Vladimir Nabokov presumably chose the English title for this novel because it describes an elaborate chess strategy, one which midway through the book fails its creator in tournament play, and in the end in the game of self-preservation. But it might just as well have been chosen to describe the central character's use of chess itself as a strategic defense against life. Luzhin, from childhood on, is never able to make a connection between himself and the world. His relationship to his parents' life in pre-revolutionary Russia is as abstract as that of an austistic genius' attachment to the complex theory of a computer game. Leaving Russia, such an emotional and nostalgic experience for Nabokov himself, disrupts Luzhin's psyche not a whit, for he has never invested any concrete part of himself in its memory. Indeed, Luzhin is so remote that the reader will often wonder what a concrete part of himself might look like in the first place. Discovering chess is the central event of his life, and losing it his central tragedy. There are some astonishing characters here: Luzhin's wife, who cannot hold onto her elusive husband any more than she might catch an ocean wave in her outstretched arms; his wife's parents, who have made Russia into a caricature of itself, trapped in a bowl of beet soup and served up to the strains of balalaikas; the sinister Valentinov, the real grandmaster of Luzhin's psyche, who moves his pawn on an immense emotional chessboard, the distant reaches of which even the novel itself would not seem to contain. "The Defense" is an exciting tour de force. It will stretch any reader's imagination into utterly uncharted territory. Nabokov's language is, as always, crisp and clear as a blue December morning. His worlds, spinning through the literary cosmos, are like nothing glimpsed through any telescope before.