In anticipation of the last Nabokov novel (or, stack of 138 index cards roughly equalling a novel), The Original of Laura, due out in November, I’ve been reading one Nabokov novel a month.

(Previously in BookNerd: Pnin , Lolita , and Invitation to a Beheading .)

I had a hell of a time coming to the subject of this report. My initial plan was to re-read my favorite of Nabokov's novels, Pale Fire , written in 1962. I also considered Speak, Memory another longtime favorite of mine, though not a novel. I hope that if you're on a Nabokov kick like me, and you haven't read these books, that you will.

This month I decided instead to write about a Nabakov story—a nice change from analyzing a whole novel in the space of one post—naively thinking a story would be easier.

The most recent edition of Nabokov's short fiction has 68 stories, so I've been flipping through, hoping that "the" story would emerge somehow, as if by magic or by some inexplicable intervention. I tagged ten stories as possibilities (see photo: actual tags).



At various times, I considered doing a bit of research to find out what other people think is his best or most influential story. I resisted.

A writer of short prose and poetry that I admire quite a bit, saw the book and said, "You're reading one of the best books ever written."

Thinking that she misread the title somehow and thought it was a novel, I held it up and asked, "The stories?"

"Yes," she said.

This confirmed that picking a story was the right idea. But I still had to pick the story. Flipping through the ten I had marked again I noticed a story I had missed. What the heck, I figured. I sat on a concrete bench outside the Henry Art Gallery and read "The Vane Sisters."

Written in 1951, rejected and later published by The New Yorker in 1959, "The Vane Sisters" comes across on first read as a solid, accessible story—cruel, funny, and sad as any of the Nabokov novels I've read.

In a poetic opening scene, a French professor walks on campus watching icicles fall. He goes on to tell the story of a former student, Sybil, and her sister Cynthia—who are both dead when the story begins; Sybil, committed suicide. The narrator evaluates the sisters in excruciating detail. Through his eyes, they appear pathetic, then as the descriptions evolve, almost demonic. He is especially harsh with Cynthia, who he supposedly liked enough to date for a while:

"The interval between her thick black eyebrows was always shiny, and shiny too were the fleshy volutes of her nostrils. The coarse texture of her epiderm looked almost masculine, and, in the stark lamplight of her studio, you could see the pores of her thirty-two-year old face fairly gaping at you like something in an aquarium."

In the middle of reading that description, I asked a friend sitting near me, who had admitted earlier in the day to being a fan of Lolita , "Was Nabokov disgusted by people, or was he fascinated by their worst characteristics?"

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I can't remember her exact words, but my take-away was, "It's probably a character trick."

Sybil writes her suicide note to the end of her French exam. The professor/narrator takes it to Cynthia; they analyze it together (he corrects the grammar), and the two start to spend a lot of time together. They go to seances that conjure up Oscar Wilde and Leo Tolstoy. He talks disdainfully about her fixation on "intervenient auras" and finding patterns in texts. She calls him a snob. It doesn't work out. The story wraps up with his vaguely comic experience of dealing with her death, and a mysteriously poetic last paragraph.

After finishing the story, I was ready for research. The first thing I found was a comment from Nabokov, included in the introduction to a 1975 story collection:

"...the narrator is supposed to be unaware that his last paragraph has been used acrostically by two dead girls to assert their mysterious participation in the story. This particular trick can be tried only once in a thousand years of fiction. Whether it has come off is another question."

If I had gone the research route from the beginning, I would have learned that this is one of Nabokov's most famous stories, particularly for its extreme example of an unreliable narrator.

I read the story again and saw that the narrator is looking for patterns in everything—the trait he most deplored in Cynthia. In the opening scene with the icicles, for example, he is...

"rewarded at last, upon choosing one, by the sight of what might be described as the dot of an exclamation mark leaving its ordinary position to glide down very fast--a jot faster than the thaw-drop it raced."

Everything the narrator says is called into question, not just because you doubt his honesty or self-awareness, which is the case with any unreliable narrator. I actually started to question who was "speaking" or telling the story, leaving me with the feeling described in the last sentence:

"Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost."

Apparently, "The Vane Sisters" is full of word games and acrostics. You can read more about it here or at more scholarly websites. I've avoided reading the full analysis. It's like looking up the answers to the New York Times anacrostic, which I don't do either. I want to figure it out myself.