Volume 10, Number 11 · June 6, 1968
Mirror, Mirror
By William H. Gass
King, Queen, Knave
by Vladimir Nabokov
McGraw-Hill, 273 pp., $5.95
Nabokov: The Man and His Work
edited by L.S. Dembo
Wisconsin, 282 pp., $6.50
Keys to Lolita
by Carl R. Proffer
Indiana, 160 pp., $5.00
The train stands still. The world is moving. Objects shatter into points of light, reflections are observant, shadows follow us like menacing dogs. All the visual qualities of things, and these predominate, are hard and impersonal. Everything's a mirror or an image in a mirror; depth is space upon a surface where every visual relationship is retained, though subtly inverted. A Nabokov novel is sliding by us, through our still attention, and the objects which it holds up to us are flat and disconnected: cathedral, shop sign, top hat, fish, a barber's copper basin. The people, head to foot, are faces (knees, toes, elbows: these are also faces); faces done in glossy printers' colors and stamped out on the covers of a million magazines, the copies of each kind the same, yet when found in different combinations, they are strangely altered (if left in the seat of a train or taken to a room, scissored up for scrapbooks, read in bed, or stacked in dusty attics to be saved), and they possess, in every place they occupy, an additional significance, as cards are changed in fresh hands, so that the two of spades on one occasion fills a flush, while on another proves to be superfluous, or as the White Queen's puissant Knave is rendered impotent, slid to a new square. Cards and chessmen, characters and words: all are hollow powers. Ruled by rules which confine their moves, they form a world of crisp, complex, abstract, and often elegant, though finally trivial, relations.
Review, 2652 words
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