Mary

It's the ending of this that truly makes it work. What it has to say about the idealism of loves lost cuts to the quick. And in terms of Nabokov's ability to conjure a scene, for no apparent reason the thing that sticks with me is that the door numbers for the rooms of the hotel are pages ripped out of a numbered calander. What a bizarre and evocative detail.

I read this in 1999 and then again a few years ago. THIS is what first novels should aspire towards. Instead every MFA wants to Pynchon-it over the fence and we have reams of bad puns and pop culture references all alluding to some Grand Joke. Well, that wasn't funny, was it?

This is a tome about estrangement, when the ideas and habits of home are exiled, what's left?

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 show more 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. show less

Nabokov completed his first novel at age 26 while in Berlin with his family, which had been forced into exile after the Bolshevik Revolution. Written in Russian, it is heavily autobiographical in inspiration and focused on themes that would be developed further in his later literary output, most essentially young love and memory.

Nabokov's alter-ego in this story in Ganin, a young Russian man who has been forced to flee Russia and who has ended up in Berlin following the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war, in which he fought in the White Army. He is staying in a long-term residency situation with a small group of fellow Russian emigres, and learns that one of them is expecting his wife to join him in 6 days hence. In discussion with show more this fellow, he learns that this wife is Mary, who was Ganin's first love as a sixteen year old teenager. Quite a coincidence, you might say.

This revelation brings up a flood of memories for Ganin, and he spends the next few days living among them in his head. The reader sees that this first love was primed by Ganin's illness and recovery from typhus, which left him in a heightened emotional state that of necessity led to him falling in love with a girl whose image he formed in his sick room. It happened that this image came to be embodied in Mary.

Nabokov thus explores the idea that Ganin's love for Mary had nothing to do with Mary's actual qualities, but sprang solely from his own reflections and projections. Reliving those memories in Berlin years later is pleasant for Ganin, but also stunts any productivity. Under their influence he decides to meet Mary at her train's arrival in Berlin and arranges to leave her husband behind so he can steal away with her, but then on the morning of arrival, he essentially snaps out of it and realizes that life has to move on. It's the opposite of what happens to Humbert Humbert in Lolita, then, as Humbert is forever arrested in his development by a young love affair, while Ganin leaves it behind.

On a side train of thought, Nabokov has one of the characters speak the line, "We should love Russia. Without the love of us emigres, Russia is finished. None of the people there love her.", which one assumes is his own comment on what has happened politically in his native land. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

"Mary" is Nabokov's 1st novel. The protagonist is a Russian emigre living in a boarding house filled with other Russian emigres. He is always broke, planning to leave Berlin (but has not yet), he's bored with his girlfriend, tired of everyone. Then unexpectedly he learns that one of his annoying neighbors is the husband of his first love, Mary, and that she is due to arrive in a very short time. He begins to reminisce and suddenly is filled with detailed and touching memories of his relationship with her. He dreams of their reunion, of how she'll leave her husband, go with him to France. He prepares for this and awaits the moment she gets off the train... It is a well-written story of longing, even in its predictability.