Bend Sinister

Rating:
Summary: Stop plucking your nose hairs and read this book
Review: "Bend Sinister" is one of Nabokov's supreme masterpieces and like all great works of art it operates on many levels simultaneously. Not the least of these levels is that of the `black comedy,' one of the most savage and sophisticated ever written.

Krug is a world famous philosopher who in his youth was schooled alongside an annoying lad named Paduk whom he used to, almost felt compelled to, bully. Through some grotesque trick of fate Paduk has become dictator---of the whole country that is--- and most of the citizens are busy worshipping his calls to `duty.' Krug's wife has just died and he is deeply attached to his 8 year old son David. Paduk and his cronies are trying to get Krug to endorse the new regime--put his prestige behind it and give it more legitimacy. Krug's friends try to warn him to leave the god-forsaken country while he's still able, but he's a conceited and stubborn bastard with way too much faith in his own powers and the `goodness' of humanity. So he acts the wise-guy, sticks around and gets gradually pulled into a nightmare he can't wake up from.

By creating the Twilight-Zone-like imaginary land of Padukgrad, Nabokov frees himself from any specific locale and is able to incorporate multiple totalitarian state caricatures of the German, Italian and Russian variety all at once. Bits and pieces of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin all collide and overlap in the Paduk character.

Nabakov goes into flashback, and dream and `thinking' states quite often without warning, and without clearly indicating where one state ends and the other begins. It all flows together like reality. This is good because it forces readers to constantly stay on the alert or be baffled. He sets traps for superficial readers left and right and really doesn't want them reading his novel.

Through Krug's ruminations, Nabokov makes some of his most poetic observations about philosophical questions of life and death and existence.

The recurring motif of the oblong puddle emphasizes the connection between Nabokov's layer of life where it also occurs (revealed in the spectacular ending) and that of his fictional creation Krug.

Unlike the willfully ignorant leftist intellectuals of the West who were at the time busy worshiping Stalin, Nabokov in 1945 was fully aware of what was going on in the land of his birth and how it was going on. Nadezda Mandelstam's famous book about the Stalin era persecution of her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, "Hope Against Hope," which came out some 25 years later corroborates to a startlingly accurate degree many of the things Nabokov describes in his `fantasy' creation.

Bits of Lenin's speeches make appearances here and there. In Chapter 13 Nabokov uses sections of the Soviet constitution, full of non-sequiturs and idiotic declarations of `obvious fact with no further proof required' (which uninitiated readers will think are too absurd to be true), to emphasize just how absurd the `real' world can often be and how much stranger than fiction. In certain sections, Nabokov's savage wit becomes downright hilarious. During the conversation between Krug and Paduk, for example, there are constant interruptions where the `right way of addressing a dictator' is continually suggested, finally culminating in the entrance of the parrot with the note in its beak which is kicked like a football out of the room. This scene reminds me of the films of Luis Bunuel, one of Nabokov's few peers in the cinema.

In Chapter 5, despite his openly stated hatred of Freudian psychoanalysis, Nabokov gets into some heavy almost Jungian dream descriptions (though of course he refrains from analysis). Nabokov is never ignorant of ideas he might happen to despise. He also claims to be indifferent to politics which, again, does not imply ignorance, and the many subtle layers within "Bend Sinister" gradually and eloquently reveal the man's vast knowledge of the subject at its most sophisticated levels.

Nabokov reveals where his political sympathies lie through the flashback scene about Krug's new headmaster with open-minded `ideas,' who tolerates every `social' instinct but not the lack of any such instinct in an individual. Nabokov sides with the individual and against all kinds of socialist, leftist claptrap.

Especially choice are the farcical scenes which Nabokov uses to ridicule the flirting brutes and bimbos (Paduk's spies and foot soldiers) going about their business, doing their "duty," so they can get it out of the way and get on with the `pleasures' of their shallow, empty-headed existence. Not having the brains to see anything wrong in what they're doing (helping Paduk flush the country down the toilet), and feeling themselves to be fully `lawful' and in the right, they are outraged when Krug suggests they might be guilty of even as much as petty thievery.

Chapter 7 is the most bizarre chapter. Unlike the rest of the book, it's rendered in the present tense and reads as if it was a collection of Nabokov's notes about the different things he wanted to describe if he ever got to complete and `fill out' his writing in this very chapter; but this completion, `fleshing out' and description of things in more detail, this bringing of simple notes to poetically crafted sentences keeps getting interrupted by other ideas which intervene and disrupt things! (Didn't I say it was bizarre?) The first 14 pages are all in this odd state of limbo as the Ember character goes on blabbing endlessly about different interpretations of "Hamlet." Now, this is a fascinating puzzle and it's intriguing but it completely throws off the `flow' of the book. Nabokov drops a couple of sentences in there about how "he's still jesting," but as far as I'm concerned this is one jest that goes on too esoterically long and provides the only boring section of the book. Most people won't make heads or tails of these pages until they come to the end of the chapter. After the magnificent paragraph about problems of `translations' which is supposed to bring together everything that went before, but which will fly over the head of all but the most esoteric readers, Nabokov suddenly shifts into past tense again and gets back to the story at hand. It's interesting to go back after reading the rest of the book and study the structure of this chapter in more detail. Here "Bend Sinister" becomes a novel contemplating itself in the process of its making. In the end when Nabokov introduces the writer, i.e. himself, into the novel, we are already kind of familiar with him because of this chapter and several other less noticeable intrusions scattered throughout the book. Its rough parallel in cinema is the Fellini-style `film within a film' (8-1/2) or the camera pulling away on the director directing the very same pulling away of the camera on himself, i.e., an endless succession (Fellini's "And the Ship Sails On" ends this way).

In the last chapter, the adolescent games the mad (and yet paradoxically not so mad) Krug tries to play upon Paduk and his band of laughably absurd `serious' adult brutes, emphasizes the fact that dictators are just pathetic overgrown children and mocks everything `serious' about the so-called serious world of adults which is so often nothing but more childish nonsense. Krug has a flash that all this has happened before and in fact it has. This so-called `adult' world is not very different from the adolescent world within which Krug used to play pranks on Paduk, but with the very uncomfortable difference that now the price for playing those pranks is death.

"Bend Sinister" is full of poetic passages and Nabokov's own brand of Proustian memory investigations, and must definitely be read slowly and carefully. This isn't writing you just skim over for the story---the `real story' is in the style, and on a deeper level the main `character' is always Nabokov himself. One of the most interesting aspects of Nabokov's style is, of course, the way he constantly mocks all kinds of cliched writing conventions by never abiding by them, and though this is not as prevalent here as in "Ada," it's still a major obsession. So read slowly, reread, lock into Nabokov's imagination, and be amazed.

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Summary: Nabokov's most political novel, by turns funny and tragic
Review: Bend Sinister (1947) was the first novel Vladimir Nabokov wrote in the United States, and his second novel in English. Like one of his later Russian-language novels, Invitation to a Beheading, it is explicitly political, in a way generally foreign to Nabokov. (Indeed, to write a "political" novel was rather against Nabokov's usual artistic philosophy, and in his 1963 Introduction to this novel, he takes pains to point out that the focus of the novel is the main character's relationship with his son, not the repressive political conditions which drive the novel's plot.) Bend Sinister opens with the death of Olga Krug, beloved wife of philosopher Adam Krug. Krug is left with an 8-year old boy, David, in a country torn by a revolution led by an oafish schoolmate of Krug's, Paduk, called the Toad by his fellows at school. The new regime attempts to gain Krug's support, offering both the carrot of a University presidentship and the stick of veiled threats conveyed by the arrest, over time, of many of Krug's friends. The brutal climax comes when the new regime, almost by accident, realizes that the only lever that will work on Krug is threats to his son, then, due, apparently, to grotesque incompetence, manages to fumble away that lever.
The novel is (one is tempted to say "of course") beautifully written. Passage after passage is lushly quotable, featuring VN's elegant long sentences, lovely imagery, and complexly constructed metaphors; as well as his love of puns, repeated symbols, and humour. The characters are well-portrayed also -- Krug, of course, and his friends such as Ember and Maximov, as well as villains such as the Widmerpoolish dictator Paduk and the sluttish maid Mariette. The novel, though ultimately quite tragic, is filled with comic scenes, such as the arrest of Ember, and comic set-pieces, such as the refugee hiding in a broken elevator. As VN asserts, the relationship between Adam Krug and his son is the fulcrum on which the novel turns, and it is from that the novel gains its emotional power. But much of the novel is taken up with rather broad satire of totalitarian communism. The version portrayed here is of course an exaggeration of the true horror that so affected Nabokov's life, but it still has bite. The central philosophy of the new regime is not Marxism per se, but something called "Ekwilism", which resembles the philosophy satirized in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron" -- it is the duty of every citizen to be equal to every other, and thus great achievement is unworthy. (It is not to be missed that Paduk was a failure and a pariah at school.) All this is bitterly funny, but almost unfortunate, in that it is so over the top in places that it can be rejected as unfair to the Soviet system which it seems clearly aimed at. That's really beside the point, however -- taken for itself, Bend Sinister is beautifully written, often very funny, and ultimately wrenching and tragic.

Rating:
Summary: Be patient.
Review: I confess to finding Nabokov a strange writer. In novels such as "Bend Sinister", I find his style frequently irritating, almost as if he's writing the novel purely to amuse himself - this self-indulgence becoming almost unbearable. Indeed, in his introduction to this novel, Nabokov states that "in the long run...it is only the author's private satisfaction that counts". Really? Either this is monstrous egotism or vast insecurity. In my view, Nabokov is not the great author he perhaps thought himself to be (if one is to take such statements, and others, at their face value).

Nonetheless, I think that he is an interesting and at times challenging writer. In this book as in most of his others, it is fatal to give up half way through, as often the book's full effect and meaning only become apparent at or near the end. It's best to read this novel in as few sittings as possible to get the best effect - I shouldn't think that it would work as well in many, short bursts of reading. You need to immerse yourself in the claustrophobic and melancholic world created by Nabokov.

The story revolves around Adam Krug and his son David, who is seized by by agents of a totalitarian state. Will Krug recover the boy by submitting to the demands of the state? Thus the central theme of the novel is the love of the father for his son, most often conveyed in flash-backs. Nabokov confirms in his introduction that this indeed was his main theme, and disclaimed any idea that the novel was a political critique or satire. Take such statements at face value if you wish, but there's too much satire/criticism in the novel for that to be true. It would not be the novel it is without that totalitarian background: the claustrophobia and near Kafkaesque feeling of individual helplessness enhance the feelings of worry and despair Krug feels when his son disappears.

So, a novel to take time out to immerse yourself in, and overall to be patient with.

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Summary: A glimpse at the wounded inner child of the beast
Review: In 1984 Orwell gave us a terrifying study of the mind of a totalitarian socialist state. With BEND SINISTER, Vladimir Nabokov confronts a similar beast but instead of dissecting its addled brain, he explores its pathetic heart.

And BEND SINISTER, for my money, is the more frightening of the two. Bad ideas often prove less dangerous than madmen and madwomen who would tear down to world to avenge childhood slights.

Look out. The common man has taken over Ekwist and his name is Paduk. Paduk, the socially inept son of an inventor of insane gadgets such as a typewriter that duplicates one¡¯s own handwritten script, has seized control of the Eastern European backwater and only one thing stands in his way of complete domination: Adam Krug.

Krug, a world famous though colossally misunderstood philosopher, is Ekwist¡¯s only claim to global fame. Paduk needs Krug¡¯s allegiance if he is to have legitimacy. There are also unspoken old scores to settle: Krug and Paduk went to school together and the young philosopher had tormented the young dictator, dubbing him with the nickname toad, embarrassing him sexually and sitting on his face at every opportunity.

When Krug refuses to be bought with the highest academic post in the land, one of his friends after another starts disappearing. Krug, however, still refuses to sign a ridiculous oath of allegiance (which is partly plagiarized from Lenin). His resistance appears less heroic than an act of sheer stubbornness and intellectual snobbery, almost a personal indulgence.

But Paduk¡¯s henchmen finally get to Krug through his young son, David. How they do it is simply too horrible for me to repeat. Imagine something nearly unthinkable and you are half-way there. To be honest, the unspeakable fate David suffers (far worse than anything Lolita endures) soured the book for me. But such as with Nabakov¡¯s other controversial works, LOLITA, with its pedophilia, and ADA, with its paean to teenage incest, I can¡¯t honestly say that I regret reading the book, nor would I deny the experience to anyone else. Nabokov is that damn good.

I also can¡¯t honestly deny that this book is the work of a genius. It boasts several comic scenes worthy of the best of Monty Python. In one, Krug bounces from checkpoint to checkpoint on a bridge manned by idiotic and paranoid soldiers because he has no entry pass for one gate and no exit pass from the other. Equally side-splitting is Krug¡¯s savage dismissal of a mediocre academic sent by Paduk to woo him.

An optional course in this mini-feast of a book (it is only 201 pages) is this red herring served by Nabokov in his later essays, in which he claimed (it is hard to spot this when reading BEND SINISTER) that during the book Krug becomes aware that he is only Nabokov¡¯s creation, prompting him to undertake an existential revaluation of his own bonds with his friends and family. Krug seems to come to the conclusion that his love for his son is real whether he is or not, which may be Nabokov¡¯s biggest joke or his greatest truth or both.

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Summary: A timely satire on anti-intellectualism
Review: This is an intelligent, black satire of a state where mediocrity is celebrated and intellectualism denigrated.

Ironically many American reviewers (above) identify the political philosophy of this state as essentially communist. Nabokov repeatedly denied this. In fact he was trying to get at something deeper than simple left or right labels. What happens when confirmity becomes the norm? The obtuse, arrogant, intellectual non-conformist - like Krug - is inexorably drawn into conflict with a society that demands his allegiance. And like Kundera's character in The Joke or Oscar Schindler, or even Socrates the bloody minded become heroic. Not out of an impulse to heroism, just because they refuse to conform.

After the fall of communism it is interesting to reflect whether the US with its relentless celebration of folksiness and denigration of "intellectual elites" more resembles Nabokov's dystopia than we realise.

Doesn't a semi-educated president resemble Paduk? Don't all American children swear an idiotic oath of allegiance to the fatherland in much the same way as was demanded of Krug? Don't officials lock up hundreds without trial in the name of protecting freedom? - apparently unaware that they are busy destroying it. Isn't America the land of overgrown adolescents, ignorant, unreflective, blithe, pleasure seeking and armed? Of course non-conformists are not killed these days. They are emblazoned with the scarlet letter of Anti-American. A modern-day word for heretic. It is interesting to reflect that there is no equivalent word for people who criticise Britain, or France, Sweden, Canada or Spain. Why? Because the nation is not so closely identified with a national philosophy and because criticism is not regarded as threatening. This how evil arises in the world. We stop reflecting why and simply assume that our actions can only be for the good.

Ekwist lives - unfortunately.