Volume 16, Number 5 · March 25, 1971
It's About Time
By Jack Richardson
Mary
by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Michael Glenny
McGraw-Hill, 114 pp., $6.95
It is somehow fitting that we should receive Nabokov's earliest novel after he has presented us with the complex works of his maturity. The first book, Mary, is thus allowed to meet the American reader cloaked in that temporal ambiguity of which its author is so fond and which, in the form of antic memoirs, has been the theme of so many of his later works. For Nabokov's readers, this narrative of émigré life should have a dual significance: first, there is the literary event itself, the publication in English of the beginnings of a now familiar style; second, there is the substance of the book, an intense act of reminiscence that reminds us of what will, and what has, issued from its creator. If the syntax of the last sentence seems odd, it is because grammarian's time and Nabokov's are seldom in precise synchronization.
Review, 2626 words
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