Anyone else here read this? I don't see it brought up

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If it were by anybody else, it would be their best work. However, VN wrote a half a dozen masterpieces that piss all over this slim, simple work.

It's good and entertaining and was apparently a big breakthrough for him, but I've always thought of it as a simple and not particularly deep novel, which is what you get with an ensemble of ragdolls I suppose.

>>9336943
It's his noir, and wickedly hilarious. One of the most frightfully apt first paragraphs in all noveldom.

its ok

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>>9337190
Yeah, gotta give him credit for that ballsy first paragraph.

>>9337190
post it pls

>>9337190
It struck me as a straight up black comedy. Every page had something that made me giggle

>>9337228
>Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

>>9337275
>Berlin, Germany

As opposed to Berlin, Egypt.

>>9337283
Berlin, Georgia
Berlin, Illinois
Berlin, Indiana, extinct town
Berlin, Kansas
Berlin, Kentucky
Berlin, Maryland
Berlin, Massachusetts
Berlin, Michigan
Berlin, Nevada
Berlin, New Hampshire
Berlin, New Jersey
Berlin, New York

Just some Berlins in America alone.

>>9337283
>not knowing that many of VN's novels take place in imaginary settings, hence the distinction and precision.

This is not a pleb thread. Fuck off.

>>9337294
>americans in charge of town names

>>9337299
the wider scope of someones work should have no reflection on the credibility of a specific story

dickhead

>>9337228
What I remembered as the first 'graph is actually the first page:

>1. 'Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

>2.'This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome.

>3.'It so happened one night Albinus had a beautiful idea. True, it was not quite his own...[but]...he made it his own by liking it, playing with it, letting it grow upon him, and that goes to make lawful property in the free city of the mind....'

Will reading Nabokov make my weanie grow?

>>9337283
This is the comment of someone who is very satisfied with what he knows.

>>9337345
Yes. And shrink. And grow again. Back and forth like any decent novel, really..

>>9336989
I can think of maybe four, Ada, Speak, Memory, Pale Fire and Lolita. What do you consider the half dozen to be? Do you toss in Pnin and Despair?

>>9337352
Is this meant to be a criticism?

>>9337394
You'll find out, I imagine.

>>9337283
it could be Berlin, Zembla

>>9337386
Must include Seb Knight. And I'd choose Bend Sinister, though perhaps not over Despair. (Not the person addressed).

>>9337396
Yes, I will. By asking you to give me a concrete answer instead of vague pseudo-intellectual semantics.

>>9337386
Geez-- I forgot The Gift for an instant, one of his best.

>>9337409
By my estimation, you are fucked. Invest in lube. At some point its' going to feel like the entire world has gone up your ass.

>>9337258
Well, it's that too, and maybe the single hand gun disqualifies it from *really* being a noir-- it certainly isn't Chandler! Perhaps all the movie house stuff and cool, if silly, deceit provoked me to read it that way. Plus, VN likes parodying genres, or types of writing-- the poem with notes in PF, biography in RSK, that it was easy to assume that this was his goof in a noirish direction.

>>9337323
that IS good. and I don't even really like Nabokov.

>>9336943
Yes. Absolutely love it. The visual of Albinus's brother looking through the window to see Albinus and nude Axel teasing him is wonderful. Definitely up on Nabokov's top tier with Pnin, Ada, Lo, and Pale Fire