Mary (1926)

I didn't care for the resolution. Nabokov's first work. It gets better. ( )

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2012/11/book-review-mary-by-vladimir-nabokov....

Vladimir Nabokov's Mary is the story of a man with the opportunity to be reunited with an old flame. Nostalgia is a difficult emotion to build a book around. Our fond remembrance of our past, or at least my remembrance of mine, is built around a thousand little moments gone forever.

I am not nostalgic for a holiday. I have no fond memories of this or that Thanksgiving, a wonderful New Year's Eve or a splendid Fourth of July. I have memories of those events, some are even good. But the holidays and big events are simply built up too far. I dislike most of them before they are over; and I can't think of one I'd wish back.

But the every day moments.... My grandparents used to come over every Monday night for pasta. During Lent, we would get fried fish I would douse in ketchup. I spent a summer teaching myself to play Dungeons & Dragons because we had an adventure in a box in the house, and it seemed like a shame not to use it. I spent hours building space ships with my Legos for the express purpose of having the ship crash and explode spectacularly, so that it could be rebuilt. In the fall, while I was in high school, I would buy a bag of apples from one of the farms and leave it in my car as an after school snack.

Do any of those things mean anything to you? Unless you lived a portion of it with me, of course not.

All of which is to say, Nabokov took quite a leap in writing his first book about a character living in the grips of nostalgia. Lev Ganin is a boarder in a rooming house, and the horrible little man across the hall has spent most of the past year ranting about house his wife "will be here soon." Suddenly, soon is Saturday, and when Ganin sees a picture of the wife, he realizes it's his old girlfriend Mary, "his first affair." Cue the violins.

Who is more deserving of happiness than I? Ganin starts to plot his new life with Mary. Of course he'll steal her away from her husband, and then they can have the life together they could have had if life had been different.

Nabokov keeps the plot simple, and he made Ganin just likable enough to keep me reading. In some ways, I like Ganin's antihero-ness, while there are plenty of moments I want to slap him in the head and tell him to stop acting like he's 16 years old.

Mary lacks a lot of the playfulness I liked so much in Lolita and Pale Fire. I'm chocking that up to #firstbookproblems.

I won't spoil the ending, except to say that most of the book occurs before Saturday, and my wish, my little nostalgia for Mary, is that I would have liked to have known more of Ganin when he was not caught up daydreaming about his past. ( )

Nabokov's first novel is short and simple. Memories of love,love lost, and the inability to recreate the feeling of yesterday. This novel displays some very senuous writing and shows even at this early stage (1925) Nabokov's extensive vocabulary. a quit read and worth it ( )

Mary is the story of Ganin, a Russian living in Germany after being exiled from Russia, as he remembers his love affair with Mary and waits to see her again soon.

Mary is a lovely book. While the langauge isn't as bautiful as you might expect from some other Nabrokov book (*cough Lolita cough*) it's still intrieguing and compelling. Mary is a quiet book. It doesn't deal with big events or even big ideas buta more quiet kind of event. It's about a lot of things. It's about love and memory and the different kind of things we can love in different ways. It's about being away from your home but still loving it, it's about futility and hope. Not a lot happens in this book but it isn't about things happening, it's about the inner voyage of the main character and the ending is simply lovely. It's subtle and moving and though I didn't engage with it deeply as I read I found myself days after sat thinking about it, about the idea and meanings and messages, which is surely the sign of a truly worthwhile book. ( )

It's unreasonable to expect that an author, no matter how talented, will succeed with every work they compose. It is even less reasonable to believe that their first works will be on par with their greatest. It seems to me that these are the best circumstances under which to assess Vladimir Nabokov's Mary: it is a fine book, one that shows great promise, but simply doesn't shine in light of the rest of the master's impressive oeuvre.

Despite its title, Mary primarily concerns itself with Lev Ganin, a Russian expatriate living in a boarding house in Berlin, one populated by numerous strange and varied characters. The story takes place over the final week of his residence there, as he prepares to leave the house, and discovers that one of his neighbors is married to the eponymous woman Lev loved many years ago, before he was displaced by the Russian Revolution. When Lev discovers that Mary is soon to arrive by train to live with her husband, he begins to recall vivid memories of an idyllic past and hopes to use them to influence his future.

The novel's brevity is perhaps its most surprising quality: with the exception of The Eye (also originally written in Russian but far better executed), Nabokov is rarely so compact. But what's even more surprising is that the shortness of the work doesn't contribute substantially to the way one digests it: it does not read noticeably quickly, and despite its deliberate feel the pacing is uneven at best. Though the blurb on the front of the novel claims it has a "measured dose of suspense," I felt like it never particularly affected to me at all.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the novel is the lack of depth of character. In the introduction to his second novel, King, Queen, Knave, Nabokov notes that he is aware of the transparency of the characters in Mary, and it shines through with great clarity. The émigré figures in the boarding house register only as placeholders for representations: they never truly make the leap to being meaningful characters that we care about. Even the great dying poet, meant to invoke sympathy, fails to gain the reader's pathos because we sense he is dying solely to make us feel for him, or to try and bring out a sensitive reaction in Lev.

The result is a novel that is painstakingly constructed but feels too manufactured to have a great impact. There are moments of brilliance throughout--especially the Proustian manner in which Lev conjures up his memories of Mary--but they are sadly outweighed by the somewhat laborious structure. In the introduction, Nabokov notes that he was hesitant to change much of the novel's substance because of how enamored he was with it as his first novel. And while that it is his right, the sad truth is that it does not add anything to a work that is relatively benign and surprisingly average.