Mary (Penguin Great Loves) - Softcover

Nabokov, Vladimir

3.7

7,777 ratings by Goodreads

9780141032900: Mary (Penguin Great Loves)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141032901 ISBN 13: 9780141032900

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2007

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Alone in his room in a dirty Berlin pension, Ganin reminisces about Mary, his first love. He fantasizes that a fellow lodger’s wife, due to arrive the next day, is his long-lost sweetheart and plots how they will run away together, leaving everything else far behind ...

United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love’s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love....

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Review:

He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language. (Anthony Burgess)

Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears (The Guardian)

From the Back Cover:

In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of serio-comic Russian �migr�s, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia. Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically. - John Updike

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