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[11th book of 2021. No artist for this review as I feel rather uninspired, but there is a Magritte painting that reminded me of a certain element.]

Nabokov is now regarded one of the big literary giants of the 20th century, and as his opinions are perhaps just as well known as his novels; he famously (infamously) attacked a number of considered masterpieces. So, in a sick sort of way, I was looking forward to reading Mary, his first novel, and seeing him as a fumbling, timid and inexperienced writer. This was not the case, in the end.

Though not as realised as his later works, of course, Nabokov’s writing here is lovely. We are drawn, mostly, into a pension in Berlin where a cast of characters live, including our protagonist, Ganin. The most brilliant thing about the Berlin setting, this old building, is the idea throughout that trains on the nearby railway lines appear to be passing through the house.

That bridge was a continuation of the tracks that could be seen from Ganin’s window, and he could never rid himself of the feeling that every train was passing, unseen, right through the house itself. It would come in from the far side, its phantom reverberation would shake the wall, jolt its way across the old carpet, graze a glass on the washstand, and finally disappear out of the window with a chilling clang—immediately followed by a cloud of smoke billowing up outside the window, and as this subsided a train of the Stadtbahn would emerge as though excreted by the house: olive-drab carriages with a row of dark dog-nipples along their roofs and a stubby little locomotive coupled at the wrong end, moving briskly backward as it pulled the carriages into the white distance between black walls, whose sooty blackness was either coming in patches or was mottled with frescoes of outdated advertisements.

“Time Transfixed”��1938 [Said Magritte Painting]

Mary is about first love. Ganin is an unemployed, rather despondent, young Russian living in Berlin with a number of other Russians in this pension. One of the other occupants of the building has his wife arriving, and that is the thread that carries us through the novel: the arrival of Mary. It transpires that this man’s wife, Mary, was once a lover of Ganin’s, a long time ago, in Russia. It was only a four month affair but it seems that Ganin believes he was far happier then, surer of himself; I think it is something we have all felt in our lives, that, if only we were elsewhere, we would be happier, healthier, better, etc. people. Of course, it is never the case: you are who you are in England, in Russia, in Germany, in France. Like it goes in Joyce’s Ulysses: Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. As well as being about love, I think Mary is also about this idea. There is the wonderful character, a poet, called Podtyagin, who also lives in the building who spends the entire novel attempting to get a passport to get to Paris where he believes it is cheaper and better than Berlin, where he imagines he will be happier. His continuous trying takes up fragments of the novel, along with his frequent heart attacks. And poor Ganin is also trying to ditch a girlfriend he no longer loves, but cannot work out how to do it. The novel, with these parts and characters, becomes quite claustrophobic, but Nabokov does give us some breathing room.

Despite being his first novel, Nabokov excellently moves the narrative from the present to the past. For the time, surprisingly, this novel has Nabokov writing Russia as a setting. Slowly, we see snatches of Ganin’s past in Russia with the elusive Mary, whom we are still waiting for in the present. It was only a four month affair but I suppose Ganin has exploded it in his mind, romanticised it. So, as well as being about running from oneself, I think it is also about forgotten version of ourselves. All the characters in the novel have these odd traits, odd pasts. This is a brilliant quote, quite near the start of the novel, that I think captures the concept of forgotten versions of ourselves. It is during the explanations of Ganin’s previous jobs:

Nothing was beneath his dignity; more than once he had even sold his shadow, as many of us have. In other words he went out to the suburbs to work as a movie extra on a set, in a fairground barn, where light seethed with a mystical hiss from the huge facets of lamps that were aimed, like cannon, at a crowd of extras, lit to a deathly brightness. They would fire a barrage of murderous brilliance, illuminating the painted wax of motionless faces, then expiring with a click—but for a long time yet there would glow, in those elaborate crystals, dying red sunsets—our human shame. The deal was clinched, and our anonymous shadows sent out all over the world.

This image, and the image of a train clattering straight through the middle of the building, will linger in my mind; like a train’s horn in the night, they are oddly melancholic images.