Despair: Vladimir Nabokov (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Nabokov, Vladimir

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014118454X ISBN 13: 9780141184548

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2000

Synopsis

'A work of rapture - jolting, hilarious and incredibly racy' Martin Amis, The Times

Self-satisfied, delighting in the many fascinating quirks of his own personality, Hermann Hermann is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. But then a chance meeting with Felix, a man he believes to be his double, reveals a frightening 'split' in Hermann's nature. Convinced that he has found his doppelgänger, Hermann uses this discovery to weave a money-making plan that leads to disguise, betrayal and eventually murder.

Filled with impudent, startling humour, and dominated by the egotistical and scornful figure of a killer who thinks himself an artist, Despair takes us into a deranged world of doubles and illusions, where nothing is quite as it seems.

About this title

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)

About the Author:

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, 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 014118454X
• ISBN 13: 9780141184548
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176