![]() The story is a slight thing at best-a frail straw in the wind.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. ![]() Ganin thinks of going to meet Mary and spiriting her away-of course he doesn't. This occasions the "eternal return" through memory to a time when tender was the night and gentle the tryst (the inset here with its mellifluous lyricism contrasts with the glumly enclosed existence in the pension). ![]() And Ganin, who recognizes from a snapshot that Mary was his first romance. Briefly here in Berlin, in the gracelessly German, heavy, dusty pension of Frau Dorn, a number of exiles have rooms: a brace of ballet-dancer homosexuals an aging, failing poet one Alfyorov who within a few days will be joined by the pretty wife he married before he emigrated. ![]() This is Nabokov's first novel (Mashenka), more properly novella, which is best read for its germinal indications of the later works to follow: particularly the theme of the emigre in transition which will be so triumphantly realized in another habitat, Pnin and the retrospective refrains of Speak, Memory. ![]()
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