Utterly magnificent without qualification.

As a Nabokov admirer, I am yet a dilettante. I've of course read Lolita. Pale Fire is one of my favorite books but to claim I comprehend its complexities would be absurd. And Ada confounded me entirely.

To better understand Nabokov I decided it might make sense to read him from the beginning. I already owned a copy of Mary--his first novel, written in Russian--and pulled the copy off of its bookcase last night with aims to scan the first few pages (to see what I was in for).

60 pages later it was only with great effort and a bit of maturity (it was nearly one o'clock in the morning) that I managed to pause for sleep, gulping down the second half of the novella this morning.

Broadly, the story is about visceral first love, loss and recollection. About the conflation of memory and fantasy. More deeply I'd be at a loss to plumb the depths of this work's meanings without years of careful study. I know it's the most autobiographical of Nabokov's fictional works. I know it unlocks many of the themes and symbols Nabokov would continue to use throughout his literary career.

But beyond that I can only rely on a quick dead reckoning and my own emotional response to try to grapple an understanding.

I finished the last page mere minutes ago, but already I am deeply ruminant about Nabokov's use of color symbolism in Mary. Violet and yellow make the most frequent appearances, but blue, black, green, white and the rest of the spectrum get their turns, too.

In tone, the book is sparkling. Nabokov's close supervision of the translation is obvious: the English is so handsomely turned out that it is difficult to find a superlative to describe it. Each word seems as carefully chosen as each (meaningful and disclosing) character's room and personal items in the boarding house they all share in a Russian district of Berlin. Nothing is wasted.

It's the mid-1920s and protagonist Ganin indolently kills time, a lackluster soul, purposeless since his escape from revolutionary Russia some years prior. The other boarders in Frau Dorn's pension run the gamut from tragic to ridiculous. It is the end of winter.

"...nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring," thinks Ganin early in the story. Stifled and stagnated, ready for something of meaning, he is primed for a crisis when he discovers that his fellow boarder's wife--slated to arrive the following Saturday, ending a long separation--is none other than his former, long-lost first love.

The story is tight and rapid, with a tensional acceleration that left me breathless for the resolution. Dialog and interactions in the boarding house feel Chekhovian; the concrete occurrences feel like scenes in a play, while Ganin's recollections take on a poetic dreaminess.

Every page felt like a gift, and every sentence like a gift, up until the very last word. ( )

Wow. A beautifully absorbing book about young love. Deeply descriptive and touching from start to finish. A fast short read, but well worth it. ( )

Wonderful translation of Nabokov's slim first novel, the remembrance of Russia and lost love by a young aristocratic emigre. Mirrors episodes in the autobiographical Speak, Memory.

Poignant, tender, wistful, funny. Nabokov's writing, as always, is a work of art. 6/98

The story opens, Nabokovian-style, in a Berlin rooming house with two men stranded in an elevator trying to introduce themselves to each other in the pitch darkness,

'"By the way let me introduce myself: Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov. Sorry, I think I trod on your foot --."
"How do you do." said Ganin, feeling in the dark for the hand that poked at his cuff.'

One can only imagine such a scene! (After all, the lights are off.) But from the first paragraphs of this, his first novel, it is clear that Nabokov's vivid narrative style was already with him, creating realistic settings and believable characters in sometimes comical circumstances. In fact, inside that Berlin rooming house, the two men have adjoining rooms, and a number of other characters are also alive: the elderly widow-owner, living at the end of the hall; two giggly young ballet dancers, who live down the hall; a meek older man, who is intimidated by government bureaucracy, and worried about obtaining a passport; and "a full-busted girl with striking bluish-brown eyes." As with many supporting characters in a Nabokov novel, they also become fully and enjoyably rounded as people who live out their parts in a colorful and lively story.

From the back cover we already know something that those two men in the elevator don't fully appreciate -- that, although Mary is the wife of one of them, she is also the first young-love of the other. And, fortunately for overall calm, she isn't yet in Berlin, but is emigrating from Russia. We are aware of the triangular relationship but, as that information also seeps into the story itself, life goes bustling on but tension builds, until one of the men can stand it no longer and takes irrevocable and decisive action.

It would be going too far to say that this is a psychological mystery-suspense-thriller of the modern style -- it lacks the hard edge -- but the elements are there, including a scene with some light-fingered, surreptitious rummaging through dresser drawers that will likely have you holding your breath.

To me, Mary is, instead, a very nicely depicted and intertwined slice-of-life from an urban corner of the Russian emigree community in Berlin in the 1920's, told in Nabokov's recognizable and enjoyable style. As the drama nears its end, peace returns again to the rooming house and one sees a scene that pre-echoes the conclusion of Glory, yet to be written in the future.

"From the black branches of some trees, just beginning to sprout green, a flock of sparrows fluttered away with an airy rustle and settled on the narrow ledge of a high brick wall."

This is an early and pleasant look at an author who would later mature into telling much more involuted and layered stories that would challenge the reader's understanding and then culminate, of course, in Lolita and Pale Fire. Here we can see Nabokov in a simpler and more straightforward story form and catch the beginnings of stylistic threads that will continue to flow through his novels. Nabokov's beginnings are definitely worth the look. ( )

Contains Mashen'ka, Kamera obskura, Vesna v Fial'te, Dar (Russian originals of Mary, Laughter in the Dark, Spring in Fialta, The Gift); of Dar, which has been called the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century, G.S. Smith had this to say:

"Vladmir Nabokov's The Gift, begun in 1932, published with cuts in Paris in 1937-38, in full in New York in 1952, in English translation in 1963, and finally in Russia in 1990. I have re-read it every year since before I can remember, and each time it gets better: more subtle, more profound, more funny, more poignant. The novel is above all a celebration of the private, driven by two principal convictions: the family as the most important locus of human relations, and the absurdity of politics. It is inexhaustibly rich because of the range of its characters and the parallels and contrasts between their roles, the delicate portrayal of gender relations, the resourceful handling of narrative voice (if only Bakhtin could have read it!), the exquisitely witty literary allusions, the sharpness and sensuousness of observation of things spiritual and physical, the evocation of places present and absent, and the constant awareness of how things might have been but are not. Above all, here is the Russian literary language in the hands of a newly matured master who revels in his own virtuosity, but never loses his grip on the human dimension."