Lucy Maddox’s sensitive treatment of Nabokov’s eight finished novels written in English—
Pale Fire
,
Ada
Lolita
Bend Sinister
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Transparent Things
Look at the Harlequins!
and
Pnin
—approaches the novelist’s work as significant fiction with its own integrity. Maddox provides the kind of discursive introduction that makes Nabokov’s complex work more accessible, focusing on the relationship between the eccentric, artificial structures of the novels and their deeply traditional, humanistic themes.
While the forms of the novels are idiosyncratic and often bizarre, says Maddox, the texts themselves are neither unfamiliar nor eccentric. Repeatedly the text is the frustration of desire or loss, which is for Nabokov the most agonizing and inescapable of human experiences. Maddox also traces through all eight novels the development of Nabokov’s style, which she treats as a matter of both technique and vision.