מצויין ( )

Hmm, I didn't think this one was all that well-written. The prose seems more prosaic, less Nabokovian. The perspective often shifts onto secondary characters, which is mostly a waste of time. The novel begins strongly with characterization of the boy Luzhin, but abandons him for the adult Luzhin immediately upon his reaching the public eye, with only a poorly characterized adolescent Luzhin - surely the most vital period of time for his forming personality and outlook - briefly described in retrospect; thus continuity is snapped between the boy and the adult and they almost seem different characters. The novel for me never recovers from this misstep.

I wasn't convinced by the drawing of his wife, who married him only because she thought he needed looking after and evidently had zero needs of her own (really?), but most unfortunately for my enjoyment of the novel this adult Luzhin and his descent into madness weren't sympathetic at all. This seems to be a feature of Nabokov's works, the characters who remain at a standoffish remove from the reader, and it didn't work for me in this one. ( )

The story centers on Luzhin, a melancholy, lonesome ten-year-old boy at the start of the book, spending the final days of summer at the family's country home outside of St. Petersburg. His father just broke the bad news that he must start school when they get back to town. He despises going to school. He only has any passion for his attractive young aunt, who turns out to be his father's mistress. On the same day that his mother discovers the affair, she teaches young Luzhin how to play chess. He rapidly becomes a prodigy making his debut in front of the public the following summer.

Dropping out of school, Luzhin devotes himself exclusively to chess until he falls ill. During a prolonged recuperation, he resides in a German health resort where, by chance, a major international chess tournament is being held. Luzhin’s career is launched. In the space of one paragraph, sixteen years passes, and Luzhin is still at the same spa, speaking to his future bride-to-be. At age 30, Luzhin hasn't changed much socially from the melancholy, reserved boy he was as a child. In the intervening years, a Svengali-like chess promoter named Valentinov has been in charge of managing his young prodigy's career. Now that he must compete in a significant competition, Luzhin has traveled to the resort to get ready. He leaves for his tournament in Berlin, the city where his fiancee's horrified parents reside, after an odd romance.

Luzhin plays superbly, moving on to the last round against Turati, whose original opening move he has developed a new defensive for. (He had previously fallen to Turati in a match.) Luzhin spends his evenings at the tacky house of his fiancée's philistine parents. As the days go by, Luzhin, who at best has a shaky hold of reality, loses himself more and more in the chess patterns he imposes on his surroundings. The initial move against which Luzhin had created his unique defense is absent when the final match versus Turati starts. Luzhin is so immersed in the world of chess that he cannot return to reality. He hears a voice say, "Go home," as the game ends for the night.

The denouement that follows is as fascinating as the narrative that precedes it, while Nabokov's novel ends with a strange vision of eternity. This was the third of Nabokov's first ten novels originally written in Russian. It is one of his best. ( )

Characteristic story for nabokov, itinerant downwardly-mobile soviet exile pursues female ephemeron. Tiresome at this point, but the prose is good enough to make one despair. The reader looks on, stupid and mute, wide-eyed as the tender childhood impression he has already forgotten reappears captured on the page. Precious impressions, the glass door of a painting shutting out a white reflection as he moves along the foyer, Dante's nightcap. Why bother writing anymore?

The "chess" in this is the work is hamstrung to function as metaphor and object of visual interest in comparisons between white and black, light and shadow, the proximity of figures or objects, the intrusion of megacephalous chessmen. A bit of a strange choice considering the author's familiarity with that game, though perhaps appropriate for the 20th century.

The latter half of the production is constrained. Coincidentally, after giving up "chess" N. doesn't have much else to go with. Luzhin obsesses over a succession of "subtle moves" (mostly nonsense) and repetitions (which are already the clever parallelisms of the text [see m and mme. Luzhin's childhood, L's own exile]). Of the three or so possible endings (death on thursday, death on friday, escape, or madness) he chooses one of the least interesting. ( )

Everyone, or nearly so, seems gaga about Vladimir Nabokov, even Updike, whom I greatly admire and who wrote an Afterword for this book. In this and one of the two other Nabokov books I read, he spends a lot of time describing inanimate objects, plants, rooms, architecture, etc., and in The Luzhin Defense weaves symbols into a good deal of it, which is fine if you crave description over all else and like books you need to decode. Lolita, at least, wasn't boring. Also (note:) if, like me, you're drawn to this book because of its title and chess is your thing, you'll likely be disappointed. The chess in it is garbled, secondary to the protagonist's obsession with it. ( )