** spoiler alert ** It's full of patterns and beautiful mistakes. And charming, interesting people. I loved it. It certainly left me puzzled, but not at all cross. I thought Nabakov would be horribly pretentious and intellectually snobbish, but he wasn't.


This was my favourite bit:
"One day I went for a long walk and found a place called Roquebrune. It was at Roquebrune that my mother had died thirteen years before. I well remember the day my father told me of her death and the name of the pension where it occurred. The name was "Les Violettes". I asked a chauffeur whether he knew of such a house, but he did not. I came at last to a pinkish villa roofed with the typical Provence round red tiles, and I noticed a bunch of violets clumsily painted of the gate. So this was the house. I crossed the garden and spoke to the landlady. She said that she had only lately taken over the pension from the former owner and knew nothing of the past. I asked her permission to sit awhile in the garden. An old man, naked as far down as I could see, peered at me from a balcony, but otherwise there was no one about. I sat down on a blue bench under a great eucalyptus, its bark half stripped away, as seems always to be the case with this sort of tree. Then I tried to see the pink house and the tree and the whole complexion of the place as my mother had seen it. I regretted not knowing the exact window of her room. Judging by the villa's name, I felt sure that there had been before her eyes that same bed of purple pansies. Gradually I worked myself into such a state that for a moment the pink and green seemed to shimmer and float as if seen through a veil of mist. My mother, a dim slight figure in a large hat, went slowly up the steps which seemed to dissolve into water. A terrific thump made me regain consciousness. An orange had rolled down out of the paper bag on my lap. I picked it up and left the garden. Some months later in London I happened to meet a cousin of hers. A turn of the conversation led me to mention that I had visited the place where she had died. "Oh," he said, "but it was the other Roquebrune, the one in the Var."


But I think the following letter is the best thing I've read this year. In Sebastian Knight's book, it was discovered in a mailbag thrown clear from an aeroplane crash. It was in a misaddressed envelope. Had the plane not crashed, it would have been delivered to the man identified as "that ass Mortimer":
"This will smart, my poor love. Our picnic is finished; the dark road is bumpy and the smallest child in the car is about to be sick. A cheap fool would tell you: you must be brave. But then, anything I might tell you in the way of support or consolation is sure to be milk-puddingy, - you know what I mean. You always knew what I meant. Life with you was lovely - and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink 'v' in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering 'l'. Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. And perhaps we are. You see, the greater our happiness was, the hazier its edges grew, as if its outlines were melting, and now it has dissolved altogether. I have not stopped loving you; but something is dead in me, and I cannot see you in the mist. ... This is all poetry. I am lying to you. Lily-livered. There can be nothing more cowardly than a poet beating about the bush. I think you have guessed how things stand: the damned formula of 'another woman'. I am desperately unhappy with her - here is one thing which is true. And I think there is nothing much more to be said about that side of the business.
"I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear face, we must part, we must part. Why is it so? What is this mysterious exclusiveness? One may have a thousand friends, but only one love-mate. Harems have nothing to do with this matter: I am speaking of dance, not gymnastics. Or can one imagine a tremendous Turk loving every one of his four hundred wives as I love you? For if I say 'two' I have started to count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.
"Good-bye, my poor love. I shall never forget you and never replace you. It would be absurd of me to try and persuade you that you were the pure love, and that this other passion is but a comedy in the flesh. All is flesh and all is purity. But one thing is certain: I have been happy with you and now I am miserable with another. And so life will go on. I shall joke with the chaps at the office and enjoy my dinners (until I get dyspepsia), and read novels, and write verse, and keep an eye on the stocks - and generally behave as I have always behaved. But that does not mean that I shall be happy without you... Every small thing which will remind me of you – the look of disapproval about the furniture in the rooms where you have patted cushions and spoken to the poker, every small thing which we have described together – will always seem to me one half of a shall, one half of a penny, with the other half kept by you. Goody-bye. Go away, go away. Don't write. Marry Charlie or any other good man with a pipe in his teeth. Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This blot is not due to a tear. My fountain pen has broken down and I am using a filthy pen in this filthy hotel room. The heat is terrific and I have not been able to clinch the business I was supposed to bring 'to a satisfactory close,' as that ass Mortimer says. I think you have got a book or two of mine – but that is not really important. Please don't write. L."

Quotes to remember:
"Well did he know that to flaunt one's contempt for moral code was but smuggled smugness and prejudice turned inside out."

"...she had quite inadvertently in her well-meaning innocence dallied at some pleasant sunlit corner of Sebastian's life, where Sebastian himself had not paused; and now she was left behind and did not know whether to try and catch up with him or attempt to call him back."

Approaching spring is "cold-limbed ballet-girls waiting in the wings"

"...but the author seemed to him a terrible snob, intellectually, at least. Asked to explain, he added that Knight seemed constantly to be playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules. He said he preferred books that made one think, and Knight's books didn't – they left you puzzled and cross."