Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

[This book was read forBookbugin February 2025]

While apologising for the muddle and mottle of my tale, let me repeat that it is not I who am writing, but my memory, which has its own whims and rules.

Never has an unreliable narrator been more aware of his unreliability, nor has one cautioned the reader to take his words with a pillar of salt. Unreliable narrators tend to be unreliable by dint of an unwavering faith in their own infallibility; Hermann Karlovich is different, his confidence lies elsewhere — in his ability to weave a narrative, in his conviction that his wife is not having an affair with her cousin, and in his expertise on planning the perfect disappearance — not in the reliability of his narration. And so he fails to see the signs, lovingly related in a charming, megalomaniac fashion, of his penchant for seeing double;

It seems to me now that it was, that town, constructed of certain refuse particles of my past for I discovered in it things most remarkably and most uncannily familiar to me: a low pale-blue house, the exact counterpart of which I had seen in a St Petersburg suburb; an old clothes shop, where suits hung that has belonged to dead acquaintances of mine; a street lamp bearing the same numbers (I always notice the numbers of street lamps) as one that had stood in front of the Moscow house where I lodged; and nearby the same bare birch tree with the same forked trunk in an iron corset.

The problem, however, is that there are no doubles at all. While Hermann assures us of his unreliable memory, he fails to account for the fallibility of his own perceptions. It draws one's attention to the ravine in language, between what is in the world, and what one sees of it. And this is perhaps the most interesting thing about Despair; Nabokov constructs the novel leaving crumbs for the reader to anticipate Hermann's eventual downfall, morality be damned. For, of course, there is a moral reading of Despair sitting in plain sight — Hermann is quite an unpleasant character, he has entered into his field of work for no reason other than to make money, he is openly contemptuous of his wife and everyone around him, and overestimates himself in every regard — in some ways, he reminds this reader of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, who is portrayed far more sympathetically by his author, possibly because we cannot hear the continuous self righteous tirade.

Hermann's repugnance, however, is not the problem at the centre of the novel, it is that he has gravely miscalculated his every move, and that too due to a fault in his perception, a fact that he records several times in his narration, but fails to notice entirely. For Hermann is a very well written villain, who drew this reader into his confidence quite easily, despite his obvious obnoxiousness, assuring the perfect execution of his plans, while making his ultimate downfall inevitable in the clues scattered over a well articulated narration. One almost feels sorry for Hermann, despite his being a scoundrel. Almost, but not quite.