Macabre Wit
Johnson, Lucy
Macabre Wit Mother Night, by Kurt Vormegut, Jr. Harper & Row. 202 pp. $4.95. Despair, by Vladimir Nabokov. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 222 pp. $5. Reviewed by Lucy Johnson TVThile Vladimir Nabokov's...
...The plot is the familiar one of the businessman in financial difficulties who decides to kill a man who he believes looks like him, pretend that he himself has been murdered, have his wife collect the insurance money, and rejoin him abroad where they will live happily ever after...
...sometimes he is even confused as to whether he is talking about himself or Felix and mixes the two of them together...
...Each tale is written in the first person, in an attempt to explain just what has brought the narrator to the wretched state in which he finds himself (Nabokov's Hermann is running away from a murder charge, and Vonnegut's Howard Campbell is waiting in a Jerusalem jail to be tried as a Nazi war criminal...
...Even words repeat themselves...
...Mother Night must be read to be believed...
...He slowly comes to believe that Felix' fate is entwined with his...
...there is an episode where Hermann imagines himself to be in bed and in the living room watching himself in bed...
...Its plot, wonderfully easy and fast-paced to read, is so complex, so wild, that it is almost unsummarizable...
...Nabokov is less dashing with words in this book than he often is...
...But Hermann is an interesting addition to that company...
...But in Despair, the echoes and reflections and masks are used in a plainer, more straightforward, even clinical way to build a history of mounting insanity...
...But while both novels play off sanity against insanity and both authors are witty men with a macabre sense of what is funny, the books are sharply different...
...He was also a U.S...
...As I wrote in a review of Pale Fire, Echo Valley has nothing on Nabokov...
...It's good for you...
...It is still, of course, better than most novels published, but it has not the complexity or subtlety or variety of Lolita, Pale Fire, and The Defense...
...Back in safe obscurity in New York after the war, he is taken under the quite separate wings of the publisher of The White Christian Min-uteman and of a Russian spy who built an apparatus composed almost entirely of American agents...
...describes himself as "an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination...
...Reviewed by Lucy Johnson TVThile Vladimir Nabokov's Despair tells of a madman in ordinary bourgeois Germany in the early 1930s, Mother Night lets Kurt Vonnegut create the story of a relatively sane man in the mad worlds of Hitler's Germany, World War II, and postwar New York City...
...Despair is one of Vladimir Nabokov's novels written first in Russian, in 1932 in Berlin...
...His first mistake is in seeing a resemblance between himself and Felix, a tramp...
...Vonnegut says in an introduction that the moral of the book is: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be...
...Howard W. Campbell Jr...
...The businessman is Hermann, who happens to be going insane...
...And he adds: "When you're dead you're dead" and "Make love when you can...
...He says that his imagination "hankered after reflections, repetitions, masks...
...It was published in English in 1937...
...Other things run together for him, and still others double themselves...
...counter-intelligence agent in Germany during World War II, becoming an important radio propagandist, "a shrewd and loathsome anti-Semite," who sends out coded information to the United States in his broadcasts...
...I found Despair, after its hazardous journey towards its present form, probably the least exciting of the Nabokov novels that I have read...
...Along the way there are some marvelously clever scenes of fooling and being fooled, of mixing reality with fantasy, and of horror next to commonplace acts...
...Hermann's style is more orotund, less decorated and clownish than that of some of his companions in the Nabokov portrait gallery of isolated men...
...a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times...
...It was published as a serial in 1934, as a book in 1936, and was banned in the Soviet Union...
...Nabokov did his own translation then, and, for this new edition, he has completely revamped that translation and has also revised the original novel as well...
...Mother Night is a modern satiric novel, staccato in style and black in humor...
Vol. 36 • June 1966 • No. 6
