Look at the Harlequins!
By (Author) Vladimir Nabokov
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
6th July 2017
27th June 1991
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Biographical fiction / autobiographical fiction
Narrative theme: Interior life
813.54
Paperback
224
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 13mm
168g
Nabokov's last published novel 'Look at the harlequins ... Play! Invent the world! Invent reality'. This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US, and, now dying, reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Annette his long-necked typist and Bel his daughter, as well as his own bizarre 'numerical nimbus syndrome'.
'He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language'
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.