bookbug

After randomly encountering a man who appears to be his doppelganger, Hermann Karlovich begins to plan the perfect crime, his own murder, in order to commit insurance fraud.

I have mixed feelings about this book. This is my first Nabokov, and I enjoyed his prose. However, I found most of the book to be tedious. While there are mentions here and there of Hermann's financial woes and him meeting his doppelganger, the first half of the book seems largely plotless. As the narrator, Hermann has a tendency to go on long-winded tangents, making the experience of reading the book much like wandering down a twisting forest path. I often found myself losing interest or thinking about something else and would have to force myself to focus on the text. The latter half is more interesting, if only because Hermann begins his scheme.

For me, the most interesting part of the book and its saving grace is the psychology of Hermann. He's established from the get-go as an unreliable narrator. At the start, he cheerily tells the reader that he sometimes lies or makes up stories, bringing into question everything he is narrating. He comes across as being narcissistic and grandiose while also being willfully oblivious to some things. For instance, it's heavily implied that his wife, Lydia, is cheating on him with her cousin, Ardalion, but Hermann's disdain for Ardalion as well as his belief that Lydia is a simple and silly woman blinds him to the nature of their relationship. He portrays himself as being charismatic, but the way characters interact with him suggests otherwise. When he was trying to convince his doppelganger to work for him, Hermann flat-out admitted he wasn't as eloquent as he hoped. Hermann's delusions form the basis of the book. They inform the way he interacts with the world and with the reader, making this book a fascinating character study on someone who is truly delusional and yet is so certain in their delusions.

Side note, but I've never read Dostoevsky before. In this book, Nabokov makes several references to him. I didn't exactly understand them, but I found his snipes at Dostoevsky to be rather amusing. Nabokov seems a bit salty lol "The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be some day is ambition in its most laudable form."

"Thus, a reflected image, asserting itself, laid its claims. Not I sought a refuge in a foreign land, not I grew a beard, but Felix, my slayer. Ah, if I had known him well, for years of intimacy, I might even have found it amusing to take up new quarters in the soul I had inherited. I would have known every cranny in it; all the corridors of its past; I could have enjoyed the use of all its accommodations. But Felix's soul I had studied very cursorily, so that all I knew of it were the bare outlines of his personality, two or three chance traits."