Review: King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov

King, Queen, Knave [1928] – ★★★★

This is Nabokov’s second book, written in Russian in Berlin in 1927 when he was 28. At first glance, the novel may appear to be a rather banal take on a bourgeois love triangle, but Nabokov’s inventive use of language, his obsession with minute details to capture moments in time, and his uncanny humour all soon unveil a curious story with deep psychological portrayals, moments of delicious suspense, and one unpredictable ending. The plot revolves around one young man from the provinces named Franz Bubendorf, who comes to Berlin to work for his “uncle” and successful businessman Kurt Dreyer. Franz becomes immediately smitten with Dreyer’s beautiful young wife Marta, and his love is returned, but, barricading their path to happiness, is always the ever-present, annoying and “permanent” Dreyer. Will the couple find the way to be together, while also enjoying Dreyer’s hard-earned money?

The first part of the book is focused on timid Franz as he tries to settle into the foreign-to-him city, searches for an apartment and gets used to Dreyer’s business – a large store selling clothes. He has to accustom himself to the noise and fast-pace of the city, and, soon, with the help from Marta, becomes more confident, in no time envisioning himself in the place of Dreyer (“The Knave sets his sights on The King’s place near The Queen in a pack of cards”). The novel progresses with Franz and Marta’s love affair as Dreyer remains oblivious to his beloved nephew’s encroachment on his sacred territory, and continues to welcome Franz to dinner virtually every evening, and plays tennis with him every Saturday. Franz and Marta grow more impatient and restless in their uncomfortable love affair, already devising plans to “get rid” of Dreyer, and Nabokov teases his reader with various “would-be” resolutions that never quite materialise in the story – until the very end.

Any other author would perhaps have focused on the cold, distant husband-wife relationship in the middle-class family, or on the thrill of the forbidden love affair, but Nabokov being Nabokov, has many other ideas. He is interested in how the “morally unthinkable” can gradually, over time, become very much the “thinkable” and even the “doable”. He keeps his reader off-balance and intellectually-stimulated by his use of symbolism and allusions. For example, a portion of the novel is taken by Dreyer’s secret business dealings with one eccentric inventor. Bit by bit, we find out what this invention that Dreyer wants for his store is all about – it is mechanical mannequins who walk and move on their own. Nabokov’s point is clear. He underscores the theatricality and “artificiality” of modern everyday life. The mechanical mannequins that seemingly move “on their own” in shop windows represent ordinary people who, though apparently having free will, still do most of their actions being pulled by other forces, such as external events or their emotions. Marta and Franz are no longer “free”, but act only according to their blind desire, and Dreyer’s convictions, blind love for Marta, and daily habits also mean that his actions are predictable and he is easily deceived and manipulated by Marta and Franz in his daily life.

This is Nabokov’s only second book, but it may as well have been some other notable author’s last. Nabokov’s writing style is already very mature and confident. In a way, he is a perfect “show, don’t tell” writer, and his prose is effortlessly interesting. Chekhov allegedly said: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Nabokov is so devoted to this principle that, at times, we do not see a noun he describes actually being written at all – such as “rain” or “mannequin” – we “see” drops falling from the sky on characters’ letters, and mechanical hands and legs moving in dark rooms. The genius of Nabokov is his ability to open the whole unforgettable world of feeling or memory by simply, very much casually, mentioning a detail or instance in his plot almost in passing, taking up a line or a short paragraph at best. What would come off as “boring” under the pen of another writer, Nabokov imbues with extraordinary significance, interest or insight, such as dog Tom in this story, and other such examples are a football in Pnin, Luzhin’s wife’s shoes in The Luzhin Defence, and the class list in Lolita.

Nabokov keeps surprising his readers with ironies, too. Franz and couple Dreyer and Marta meet on the train without knowing they are meeting because neither suspects a stranger sitting across from them is, in fact, their relation. Dreyer keeps painstakingly observing his chauffeur, trying to discover whether he is an alcoholic on not, while being completely blind as to his own nephew’s daily visits to his home and what they might mean. And then, there is Franz’s mysterious landlord, who, by the end of the novel, transforms into something out of Hitchcock’s Psycho movie. We often become deliciously lost in Nabokov’s turn of phrase, in this or that unusually-placed adjective, or in the unexpectedness of his character descriptions. There is preoccupation with fate, identity and relationship triangle in the story, themes that would later become dominant in the 20^th century American fiction, notably in the works of authors Patricia Highsmith and Paul Auster.

🃏 King, Queen, Knave feels like a literary test: how much can Nabokov squeeze out of the most banal of situations? It turns out – quite a lot. It is an intriguing, “slow-burn” novel with vivid writing and characterisations. Even if the novel does not have that many ideas story-wise to amount to a truly great work and its plot does lag behind Nabokov’s writing creativity, it still contains all the flavour of that literary genius that would later characterise Nabokov’s other novels.

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