Transparent Things

Transparent Things (1972) by Vladimir Nabokov

Perhaps it is inevitable that all great writers run out of innovatory steam and are forced to produce a "few variations on favorite themes," as Borges put it. This novella, packed with weary Nabokovian games and tropes, is minor literature, yet it retains, through those same games and tropes, some of the classic Nabokovian charm. The protagonist, Hugh Person, a perpetual pun, is typical of the author's leading men. Nabokov had a penchant for anti-heroes, and was able to make the most depraved human beings at least appear humorous. Hugh ("our Person") is pathetic, dogged at first by the influence of his bumbling father, and then errant and unambitious in his career, settling for what he concedes is a highly mediocre (he sees himself as a genius; his protagonists are usually not without delusional self-confidence) position as a publishing assistant. More than this, he is incompetent in sexual matters and displays an alarming attraction to young girls, echoing several other Nabokov men in their pubescent propensities.

The core of the story describes his four trips to Switzerland and his tragicomic marriage to a half-Belgian, half-Russian skiing socialite named Armande Chamar (chamar is either a Hindu leather worker or Portuguese for to name). Of some interest is Person's meditations on memory, a ubiquitous theme for the writer, and his metaphysics of time, which recalls J.W. Dunne's thesis, that the future already exists and that we nightly commune in our dreams with both the past and the future. In the first chapter, the narrator speculates that "perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future." Of course, the irony lies in the fact that the whole story revolves around his nostalgic pilgrimage to Witt, to the Ascot Hotel, and his attempt to reconnect with a lost past, with the ghostly image of lost love. It seems that neither the past nor the future were lucid for Person.

The work is very tightly-plotted, in 26 terse chapters traveling back and forth in time, and has the manner of an inevitable logic about it, although the final flame seems like a quirk, in the same way that I felt that Mrs. Humbert's road accident was both arbitrary and necessary. It has been described as "openly artificial," laying out the clockworks of the fiction, to provide an account of "transparent things," and overall the plot is more straightforward than in some of his other books. He also experiments, as has been his style, with different methods of narrative, from eyewitness accounts to interrogation to a letter from the moribund novelist, Mr. R., a self-parody who "wrote English considerably better than he spoke it," and whose orthography Hugh finds to be idiosyncratic (if one examines Nabokov's note cards, printed in The Original of Laura, it will be seen that they have an ample amount of spelling errors, or, as he puts it, "unorthodox punctuation corresponding to singular thought").

The greatest gift of Transparent Things may be its humor, although I cannot say that it is exceptionally more humorous than his other novels; in fact, it may be somewhat less so, but since I am searching for the positive properties of this one hundred and four page piece of prose, the comic moments stand out. For instance, Nabokov provides a humorous description of what happens when Hugh goes to see Armande at the Villa Nastia, the house her father had built, and finds that she has gone off with some boys. There is also the issue of Hugh's somnambulism, which gets him in trouble more than once. Armande's kinky sexual proclivities (such as her insistence on making telephone calls to friends and acquaintances while Hugh makes love to her in bed) and an incident involving a Swissman named Wilde and a magazine in the hotel lobby (I don't want to give too much away) are other examples that come to mind. The most one can venture is to call it a tragicomedy, if not a pure comedy, not even excepting, but especially for, the melodramatic ending.