This sibilant, dazzling tale by the writer who has been defined as the leading fabulist of our time was written in 1930 (the period of The Gift) and it deals with the "spectral art" of chess here carried to the point of obsession which is so much a part of Nabokov's integral work both past and present. As is nostalgia, so that the opening game here is filled with the memory-misted scenes of Luzhin's boy-hood in Russia and his first initiation in the "game of the Gods" for which he will have a prodigious talent. Miserably alone, at home where his mother wonders whether he has some "painful inner life," and at school, Luzhin, the Wunderkind, grows-up to become a maestro. A morose, awkward figure, he is completely isolated in his opaque, imaginary world of configurations where he alone is sovereign as kings and queens and pawns are in eternal motion across his private field of vision. Now, as Luzhin is ready to enter a major tournament in Berlin, he meets a girl with a special affinity for all helpless characters. In spite of her, he finds his return from his "real life, chess life," with its clear-cut patterns, more and more difficult. It is during the match itself that his disassociation becomes complete. On his release from a sanatorium, she marries him and guards him vigilantly against his return to his "dangerous delusion." Withdrawing gradually, hiding from her, his eyes assuming a slippery expression, Luzhin finally eludes her altogether; his last refuge is an uncharted country... A classic conte, with a brilliant descriptive elegance and all the impalpable tension and hushed fascination of a grandmaster's game.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1964
ISBN: 0679727221
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1964
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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