I enjoyed reading this, especially after recently reading Gatsby. It was interesting to realize that this storyline also takes place in the 20's but over in Europe. Nabokov is playful in his writing, at times breaking away form the narrative and talking to his readers. He even makes a cameo appearance near the end of the story where a beautiful foreign couple walks past the main character.
The story is a classic love triangle where a once fairly geeky nephew begin to grow ( in many ways)as he enters into a love affair with his benefactor's wife. Dreyer, who remains amazingly unaware of the relationship, plays the cuckold husband. Franz and Martha at times seem desperately in love and at other times seem to be going through the motions. Even the planned out murder scene is postponed only because Dreyer hints that he is about to make a lot of money. There is a subplot about Dreyer entering into a business deal to make robot like store mannequins, and according to the snippets of analysis I read , their success mimics the success of the plotting couple. All in all this was a different kind of book for me, but I was glad to move away from only the most recent of fiction. I have another old Nobokv on my shelf -Ada- which I will also have to get to someday. ( )

Nabokov's second novel, originally written in Russian and translated by his son Dmitri. Nabokov himself revisited the novel in the '60's and made some fairly substantial (judging from his introduction) revisions. A more-or-less conventional adultery plot with some twists, the action split between Berlin and a seaside resort. Plot, of course, is only a small fraction of what makes a Nabokov novel enjoyable. Even in this early work, his observations and characterizations are sharp, and he's having fun with language and with the reader.

I thought I detected a slight awkwardness in some passages, almost as if something had not quite come through in the translation. Perhaps not surprising with an author as fond of wordplay as VN. Whether real or imagined on my part, this is a minor quibble - KQKn (as VN himself abbreviated it) is clever, entertaining, and very much worth reading if you've enjoyed other Nabokov. ( )

King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov
Written 1928

Martha is such a dependable.......even solid name. And dependable she was. I have to laugh, many years later Nabokov wrote another book that contained an interesting line, "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.", Lolita. So he wrote "dependable" characters, of course they were not dependable in the altruistic ordinary sense. But you can depend on them for convoluted behavior at the very least.

A basic triangle. I'd say love triangle, but in all reality love had not a thing to do with it. There was the beautiful manipulative Martha, married to unimaginative, unfaithful Dreyer whose mechanical love making was somewhat offset by his talent for making money. She was more than willing to settle for that, but when Dryer's nephew, the long legged, rather myopic Franz came into their lives, she saw possibilities in him. After all most of her friends had lovers. Yes, she decided, Franz would do nicely for her schemes, but would the scheming stop at cuckolding her husband?

Of course Dryer has his own secrets, and the secrets are not confined to other women. He has his own hopes and schemes that come into play rather providentially and tie in with the events of the rather financially chaotic times.

Nabokov's second novel is more layered and complex than his first, Mary but certainly not as intricate as his later novels became. The prose is just as beautiful at the beginning of his career as the end, but his powers of, for want of a better word, layering certainly increased with each novel, and the progression is fascinating to observe.
So take a chance, find out which is the King, Queen or Knave in this early installment of Nabokovia.