They make a sad group, most of them with personal problems on top of the fact that the Reds drove them out of their country. The setting is a Berlin boarding house in the 1920s inhabited by Russian emigres. Like Pnin, Mary is one of the more 'real' or 'conventional' of Nabokov's novels there are no science fiction or supernatural elements, nobody has a mental illness or gets involved in an outre erotic relationship. Like Laughter in the Dark, which I think of as a tale of the triumph of evil over good, and Pnin, which is about a man who loses everything, Mary is a tragic story, showing us several unhappy love relationships.

Mary is short, just 114 pages in this edition, but it is very satisfying, full of well-drawn characters, interesting relationships, vivid images and touching emotion. Ada apparently got a lot of press (it was a Time magazine cover story, for example) and on the cover of this printing of Mary is inscribed 'The First Novel by the Author of LOLITA and ADA.' Mary originally appeared in Russian in 1926 as Mashenka. This week I read the 1970 McGraw-Hill hardcover edition, translated by Michael Glenny in collaboration with Nabokov himself. (Sometimes I wonder why I read all these books, seeing as I just forget most of what I read I envy people like Marilu Henner, who have super powerful memories.)

I read Mary like ten years ago, when I was living in New York, but I had forgotten most of it by the time I borrowed it from a university library earlier this month.

Mary by vladimir nabokov