The Luzhin Defense

This setting out was accomplished almost instantaneously and immediately the whole material side of the matter dropped away: the tiny board lying open in the palm of his hand became intangible and weightless, the morocco dissolved in a pink and cream haze and everything disappeared save the chess position itself, complex, pungent, charged with extraordinary possibilities.

What a weird, weird book—and not in a good way. I love chess and I love psychological studies of characters who go mad, but

The Luzhin Defense was unfortunately a failure in regards to both. It started with such promise but then deteriorated as it went.

As a child, Luzhin is strange, flawed, and not especially likeable, but it's easy to see why he is the way that he is and to empathize with him. As an adult, though, he's simply repulsive—neither he nor Nabokov do much to engender empathy or even understanding. In fact, he's portrayed so crudely and so unsympathetically that he almost feels like a mean-spirited caricature of mental illness. He's consistently described as being sullen and listless. He barely speaks, and the little bit that the reader sees of his thoughts is nonsensical—when the narrative isn't inside his head, it's not clear he's even thinking at all. In short, he's unlikeable, uninteresting, and incomprehensible, with the physical, emotional, and psychological appeal of a slug. (At least with a slug, though, one can understand why it crawls over a trail of salt…)

This book is also a mess from a structural standpoint. Nabokov waxes poetic in his introduction about how the structure imitates a game of chess, but this seems completely unsubstantiated by the text itself. (He also assures us that we'll find Luzhin completely lovable, at which point I begin to doubt the sanity of the

author.) A good game of chess, like a good book, is divided into the three-act structure of opening, middlegame, and endgame: this book was the chess equivalent of a player just shuffling pieces around meaninglessly, developing a knight only to undevelop it, starting the Sicilian then switching to the London despite the fact that those two openings aren't just discontiguous but are for opposite colors, then—when the position is at its most confusing and most in need of a clear plan—simply resigning.

2.5 stars because I enjoyed the beginning chapters and Nabokov can turn a nice phrase, but if this had been any longer it would have been a DNF (and, as it was, the ending wasn't even really worth finishing other than to assure myself that, no, there wasn't a stroke of genius towards the end).

Some favorite passages:

On the other hand there were two books, both given him by his aunt, with which he had fallen in love for his whole life, holding them in his memory as if under a magnifying glass, and experiencing them so intensely that twenty years later, when he read them over again, he saw only a dryish paraphrase, an abridged edition, as if they had been outdistanced by the unrepeatable, immortal image that he had retained.

“What a game, what a game,” said the violinist, tenderly closing the box. “Combinations like melodies. You know, I can simply hear the moves.”

and they entered the study where a band of sunbeams, in which spun tiny particles of dust, was focused on an overstuffed armchair. She lit a cigarette and folds of smoke started to sway, soft and transparent, in the sunbeams.

It was a similar pleasure that Luzhin himself now began to experience as he skimmed fluently over the letters and numbers representing moves. At first he learned to replay the immortal games that remained from former tournaments—he would rapidly glance over the notes of chess and silently move the pieces on his board. Now and then this or that move, provided in the text with an exclamation or a question mark (depending upon whether it had been beautifully or wretchedly played), would be followed by several series of moves in parentheses, since that remarkable move branched out like a river and every branch had to be traced to its conclusion before one returned to the main channel. These possible continuations that explained the essence of blunder or foresight Luzhin gradually ceased to reconstruct actually on the board and contented himself with perceiving their melody mentally through the sequence of symbols and signs.

Let’s go and see if there are any red mushrooms under the fir trees.” Yes, they were there, those edible red boletes. Green needles adhered to their delicately brick-colored caps and sometimes a blade of grass would leave on one of them a long narrow trace. Their undersides might be holey, and occasionally a yellow slug would be sitting there—and Luzhin senior would use his pocketknife to clean moss and soil from the thick speckled-gray root of each mushroom before placing it in the basket.

Swallows soared: their flight recalled the motion of scissors swiftly cutting out some design.

She made his acquaintance on the third day after his arrival, made it the way they do in old novels or in motion pictures: she drops a handkerchief and he picks it up—with the sole difference that they interchanged roles.

and the whole chess field quivered with tension, and over this tension he was sovereign, here gathering in and there releasing electric power.

The nights were somehow bumpy. He just could not manage to force himself not to think of chess, and although he felt drowsy, sleep could find no way into his brain; it searched for a loophole, but every entrance was guarded by a chess sentry and he had the agonizing feeling that sleep was just there, close by, but on the outside of his brain: the Luzhin who was wearily scattered around the room slumbered, but the Luzhin who visualized a chessboard stayed awake and was unable to merge with his happy double. But still worse—after each session of the tournament it was with ever greater difficulty that he crawled out of the world of chess concepts, so that an unpleasant split began to appear even in daytime. After a three-hour game his head ached strangely, not all of it but in parts, in black squares of pain, and for a while he could not find the door, which was obscured by a black spot, nor could he remember the address of the cherished house:

“Horror, suffering, despair,” said the doctor quietly, “those are what this exhausting game gives rise to.”

Just as some combination, known from chess problems, can be indistinctly repeated on the board in actual play—so now the consecutive repetition of a familiar pattern was becoming noticeable in his present life.

Everything was wonderful, all the shades of love, all the convolutions and mysterious paths it had chosen. And this love was fatal.