Bend Sinister
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

The conclusion is inescapable: Nabokov liked little girls. And not after the "sugar and spice, and everything nice" tradition, either. In the sixteenth chapter of Bend Sinister, the author of Lolita says (through protagonist Professor Adam Krug) to fifteen year old housekeeper Mariette:

"You know too little or too much... if too little, then run along, lock yourself up, never come near me, because this is going to be a bestial explosion, and you might get badly hurt. I warn you. I am nearly three times your age and a great big sad hog of a man. And I don't love you."

The narrative continues:

Mea puella, puella mea. My hot, vulgar, heavenly delicate little puella. This is the translucent amphora which I slowly set down by the handles. This is the pink moth clinging--

It would be disturbing, if the running narrative - sometimes Krug, sometimes another character, sometimes Nabokov himself - weren't the deepest and most sinister opium coma ever induced by literature (save only Nabokov's earlier novel, written in Russian and translated by the man himself called "Invitation to a Beheading"). This is Nabokov's style; the student with a firm grasp of the English language is left searching here for a dictionary, there for aspirin, back to the top of the page to start again, or onward in the hope that in the end the words will get smaller, the text will get bigger, and the fog that settled over his head at the beginning of chapter two will lift in time for the climax of the novel - only to be disappointed when the climax of the novel is more of the same impossible language that, somehow, he has stayed up all night reading without once noticing the growing light in the east.

Why should you read this? Because it's good. You can't put it down. The craziness casts a line, hooks you, reels you in, cleans and guts you, sauteés you lightly, and in the end, causes you to write in long, drawn out metaphors and bloated sentences that serve only to confuse your reader, who if you have studied well, is carried along by the flow of words one into another until he realizes that dawn has come and he still has no idea what the story is about.

Bend Sinister is the story of the most brilliant man in his country's recent history - perhaps the entire history of the nation - caught up in a martial society after the sudden rise to power of the boy he bullied in school. The new regime borrows heavily from communist, fascist, and Nazi societies (as Nabokov freely admits in his introduction - about which more will be said later), and only his international prestige protects him from the fate of his imprisoned colleagues (imprisoned for being too well educated, too accustomed to expressing their own ideas - see also "Invitation To A Beheading", where Cincinnatus C. is jailed for being "opaque" in a world of "translucent" people). Friends, acquaintances, neighbors are all arrested in an attempt by the state to force Krug's cooperation, but he remains aloof, convinced that he is too well loved and too important to come to any serious harm.

Eventually the dictator, whom Krug refers to defiantly as "The Toad," his old school nickname, hits on the somewhat obvious solution: capture Krug's son, and he will do whatever you ask. I like to think that Tolstoy or Turgenev would have written a heroic ending here, and perhaps Dostoevsky would have written a pessimistic final chapter in which Krug accepts his fate and becomes a puppet of the state. Apparently Nabokov had other designs for his protagonist.

As he lies tormented in his cell, driven half-insane by the knowledge that his son was, as the result of an administrative error, given to deranged pedophiles and killers as a plaything, Nabokov "slid towards him along an inclined beam of pale light - causing instantaneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate." Krug, now aware that he is in a novel, aware that his actions are meaningless, and aware that the deaths of his wife and son were simply, as the introduction says, "but a question of style," assaults the dictator and is killed, dooming his colleagues to a meaningless, guilt-free death, and leaving Nabokov, writing as himself, to wrap up the story with a tale of moths in the evening light.

If, despite this review, you decide to read the story, save the introduction for the end. True, it's largely a love letter from Nabokov to himself, explaining all of the things that the reader was too stupid to understand about the story, all of the plot details that make him secretly giddy, all of the references to poems and stories in Russian, German, and various other Slavic languages; but it's fun to peer over his shoulder as he pats himself on the back for a job well done.

By Lolita, his style has calmed down somewhat, but Bend Sinister is his first American novel, written six years after he and the country "adopted one another," and at 200 pages, it's a good one-day read.