A tale of delusion
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Despair, a short novel by Vladimir Nabokov, exposes one man's descent into madness. The story begins with the curiously named Hermann Hermann (a wearer of tangerine gloves) stumbling across a vagrant who he instantly sees as being his doppelganger. The chance encounter with the tramp haunts and excites Hermann, and slowly he hatches a dastardly plot. Hermann justifies everything, all is crystal clear to him, his planning is pinpoint, he believes his intelligence to be mighty, and yet the one thing he cannot see is that his perceptions are distorted . . or are they? Nabokov is as subtle as ever when it comes to understanding the full picture: is Hermann a deluded fool losing his grip on reality or did one simple mistake wreck his flawless plan? Despair is a realistic, dark, and simmering first-person narrative of a man descending.
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Awful
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I couldn't even bring myself to finish this, and I can only say that about two other books in my life. A truly awful book. The characters fail to come to life, the plot such as it is is plodding, and the 'big issues' I'd expected were disappointing.
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Stunning
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Just discovering Nabokov . This is the best so far. Anyone who is a fan of the Nic Roeg film "Performance" will also enjoy this. You will lap it up.
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Intricate, entrancing, mildly distrubing.
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Nabokov plays with our minds. He places characters before the reader, then delves darkly into their minds. Hermann is a deceitful, dismissive, arrogant, deluded soul. Unhappy with his own unsatisfyingly simple life, he escapes within his own delusions, travelling away from his home. Questions arise about identity, how man sees himself related to how the rest of the world sees him and how, sometimes, the two bear no relation. Despair is a fascinating read. Nabokov's prose is a lyrical and rich as ever. A master of his genre, if not the creator of it.
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