Despair

author: Vladimir Nabokov
rating:
publication date: 1934
format: paperback
language: Russian
reread: no

final thoughts

Nabokov’s body of work is mostly unfamiliar to me. I read and enjoyed his short stories in high school but his novels have always intimidated me, so Despair was my first foray into his long-form writing. I wish I’d read this novel when I was actually in the mood for something like this! It would have been a much more enjoyable experience then, I think, and maybe I wouldn’t be so overwhelmed by the dense language. But unfortunately, that was not the case, and despair was what I felt for most of this pretty short book which took me a long, long time to finish. I still liked the (false) doppelganger trope and the unreliable narrator, and it’s definitely not my last Nabokov novel: I hope to read The Gift and/or Invitation to a Beheading someday, when I’m actually in the mood for them (I fear I may be too much of a mood reader to be in a book club… the fact that I still insist on being in one I can’t explain even to myself).