Transparent things
"Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero - sullen, gawky Hugh Person - to Switzerland... As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride... Eight years later - following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment - Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past... The several strands of dream, memory, and time [are] set off against the literary theorizing of R. and, more centrally, against the world of observable objects."--Martin Amis.
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4recommend
6mentions
6people
2010–2024years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A dissing with two of my favourite authors as protagonists, thank you!
A small extract of “Transparent Things" by Nabokov that I love so much: how a Caran d’Ache pencil is built. An incredible travel through space and time!
- I highly recommend reading some of his other books if you enjoyed Lolita - I find them to be more complicated (in a good way) and also written magnificently. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Despair, 'Ada, or Ardor', Pale Fire, and Transparent Things are all personal favorites. But all of his novels are absurdly good.
His short story 'Beneficence' may be may favorite piece of writing ever. He had a knack for capturing a simple occurrence, making it moving and immersive, and wrapping up his story with a poignant conclusion that I have found in very few other authors' works.
- Obviously not s-f as such, but - quite a few novels by Nabokov. "The Luzhin Defence" (aka "The Defense"), "The Eye", "Bend Sinister", "Transparent Things" - all very immersing, and posing the question of what's the true reality, its underpinnings and seams. Challenging reads for sure, every detail matters.
Some might recommend Pynchon as well, personally I'm not convinced but to each his own.
- As much as I enjoyed both Pale Fire and Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, I cannot, in good conscience, let these be the only Nabokov books to be mentioned here. Having read all his nonfiction and his autobiography over the past three years, I must warn against starting with either of these, two of his most difficult, novels.
You see, Nabokov toys with his readers - he leaves puzzles throughout his books; he writes in defiance of literary criticism (part of his impetus in Pale Fire); he foreshadows with a trail of anagrams. To throw someone in media res of two of his most complex tales (perhaps only surpassed by Lolita and The Gift), might give a premature distaste for Nabokov's heady style.
What I would personally recommend for someone new to Nabokov would be any of Despair, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or Transparent Things.
If you like Nabokov, you may also want to try:
Rushdie, Salman - The Satanic Verses
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
- The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a book I've read twice. I think the clean, tight simplicity of the story might make it live on, like O'Henry stories. But who TF knows?
I have read some Nabokov, but I'd never even heard of Transparent Things, FWIW.
- This may not be a counterexample, because they are probably classified as modern, but people carry on disputes about the basic elements of the plots of Nabokov’s novels. There is no general agreement about the actual plot of Transparent Things, and a lot of argument over what really happened in Lolita. In many of his works, such as Pale Fire and Bend Sinister, you have to think a lot just to apprehend what the plot was, and when you get it, it is as if the author has emerged at the end to consume the story from the beginning, in a glorious spiral of invention. The ambiguity itself is the main element of the plot.
Pardon my EDIT: The Prisoner, from 1967-8, was when ambiguity came to American TV, and with it Art (although there were precursors). To this day people argue about the plot of that one. People were so distressed at what they perceived, at the time, to be a lack of resolution (or their inability to deal with metaphor) that McGoohan had to go into hiding for a while. Really, the problem is that most people just don’t pay attention.
