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Loading... Laughter in the Dark (original 1932; edition 2006)by Vladimir Nabokov
Work InformationLaughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov (1932)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Laughter in the Dark By Vladimir Nabokov #bookreview #classic #bookstagram http://sravikabodapati.blogspot.com/2022/09/laughter-in-dark-by-vladimir-nabokov... "I must keep quiet for a little space and then walk very slowly along that bright sand of pain, towards that blue, blue wave. What bliss there is in blueness. I never knew how blue blueness could be. What a mess life has been. Now I know everything. Coming, coming, coming to drown me. There it is. How it hurts. I can't breathe..." Starts off by summarizing the whole narrative of the novel without entirely jeopardizing the impact of the detailed narrative, Laughter in the Dark is such a splendid tragicomedy. Dry humor keeps the otherwise overtly familiar plot interesting and engaging. With most of its characters tied to the magic of films and film-making, its entirety could be treated as such: an almost hilarious, horrific, and hypnotic take on a film genre that hasn't got, possibly, a term for itself. It's a mixture of horror, film noir, thriller, drama, comedy, romance, slasher, and mockumentary while diligently preserving realism at best amidst the idealism of its characters. It is another of Nabokov's tale of a middle aged man, Albinus, pining, wooing, and worshipping a 17-year old girl of filth (though both of them are filth), naïvety and deceit but this time, depending on how you look into it, the girl gains the upper hand. Albinus' decent down the misery and misfortune well was unapologetically satisfying. Laughter in the Dark made me, pardon me for this, laugh in the dark as I turn the final pages realizing I've devoured it all in one day. It is, indeed, quite a cinematic experience on its own. Some stunning excerpts from the master word-weaver, Nabokov: ** "No, you can't take a pistol and plug a girl you don't even know, simply because she attracts you." ** "One can't build up one's life on the quicksands of misfortune." ** "In my opinion, an artist must let himself be guided solely by his sense of beauty: that will never deceive him." ** "Death seems to be merely a bad habit, which nature is at present powerless to overcome." ** "Solitude has developed in him a spinsterish touchiness, and now he was deriving a morbid pleasure from feeling hurt." ** "Death is often the point of life's joke." no reviews | add a review
Distinctions
Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)891.7342Literature Literature of other languages Literature of east Indo-European and Celtic languages Russian and East Slavic languages Russian fiction USSR 1917–1991 Early 20th century 1917–1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I don't recall Nabokov being this playful in his previous novels; one can almost see the mature Nabokov emerging for the first time. This mostly comes through the character of Rex. Take his exchange with Albinus after Rex and Margot, Albinus' young mistress, have begun both a torrid affair right under Albinus' nose and a larger conspiracy to defraud Albinus: Ah, the broad-minded, sly Albinus, who is ever so blind. Then this exchange Rex has with an actress, which is also a hint of the literary allusions and wordplay that Nabokov would come to so richly embody: Ahahaha.
Nabokov also alludes to criticism of his own novels at this time, the fraught 1930's: Oh, that Conrad, so carefree and unconcerned with social problems!
A fairy tale in the opening, a rich amusing allusive stew throughout, the novel becomes a sort of film noir by the ending, with a blind man with a revolver stalking a young woman through an apartment in a recreation of the film scene that was playing at the theater when Albinus first met Margot. A fitting end to a brilliant novel. ( )