Despair

By Vladimir Nabokov

Tum-tee-tum. And once more--TUM! No, I have not gone mad. I am merely producing gleeful little sounds. The kind of glee one experiences upon making an April fool of someone. And a damned good fool I have made of someone. Who is he? Gentle reader, look at yourself in the mirror, as you seem to like so mirrors so much.

There are few novels I have read where it seems that the author is not out to entertain the reader, not attempting to enlighten or convince, but is in fact seeking out and and attacking the reader. Such has been my first experience of Nabokov. It is startling how he reaches out into your mind as you slip through his pages. He seemed to be doing what many authors might write about others doing, but few have the balls to actually act out. That he would not only be attempting to gauge the reader's reaction, but is in turn playing off that reaction and then informing the reader that he is playing him, all for the sake of...what?
While Joyce may have been one of the first paragons of the stream of consciousness (as someone has seen fit to so dub it) Nabokov has explored a wholly new possibility in it with his fusion of the author and narrator and character into one being behind which he (Nabokov) hides poking out only so much as one might imagine him to be exposing himself in reality or in the pages of fiction. It seems impossible to be able to pin down exactly where Nabokov begins from the twisted mess of his character Hermann--perhaps only in the forward...if even there.
As you read this mystery, never forget that the voice speaking to you is not some benign author laying bare before the heart of one of his characters, but rather a book as written by a manipulative character for your confusion and consumption. It seems that Nabokov has genuinely made me aware of his transcendence of the first person novel into a state which might be described as author as character.
While it may not strike you with the same force, the story is well worth the time you may choose to spend on it, if only for the glorious procession of what can only rightly follow (despite all the standards of a glamorous dramatic tradition. 8/10