Laughter in the Dark

This felt like a film noir and one of the more twisted ones at that. Being that it was written in 1938 and involves the film industry there may be some relevance to that comparison. I feel Nabokovs over the top characters are toned down enough so that it is not an absurd style experience like other early works. The over the top in an animated/fantasy would be associated with Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister. This contains down to earth characters that are animated but remain attached to the ground.Margot is immediately a classic Nabokov character. She is not brilliant like Ada, or slightly evil like Lolita but shares the same type of character defect as Lolita in that they both use people as objects and therefore have moral issues.I enjoyed the playfulness of Margot and the way she remained very secretive. Nabokov was brilliantly vague on her character development. He basically leaves her role as commented on by the main character-Albinus--(another classic name similar to Cincinatius from invitation to a beheading), reducing her inner dialogue to feelings about Rex. There are mainly just 3 characters in a sort of melodrama play but there are a few other main characters, mainly Albinu's family.Margot therefore remains mysterious while the 2 other males living wit her are developed in a more in depth manner.I agree with several of the reviews that this is his most accessible book, or rather it is written in a very traditional way without any anagrams or tons of french phrases. I feel the style works perfect here because it gives it the right kind of feel to the structure of the novel.This is the 8th Nabokov book i have read so i feel by this point i can relate it to his other works and safely say this one seems to be the most traditionally written.I do not see this as being any more light in the sense of comedy than any of his others. I actually laughed out loud more reading Bend Sinister. I feel Nabokov is a master of injecting wonderful poetic moments that can unexpectedly be moving enough to draw tears.The part about Albiniu's family echo's Bend Sinister in that it show Nabokov to be a family man at heart and believe in the family unit. I feel; Bend Sinister was about the change that happens internal to a family when your socioeconomic environment changes rapidly or in a chaotic way. A theme similar to that deals with Albiniu's family and the dramatic elements remind me of William Thackery's style.I feel this is just as dark as most of his works but has a big heart as well. The first time i noticed Nabokov was actually a very compassionate artist was when reading King Queen Knave. Just the scenes where the main characters pass time together reminds me of nemonic ways to bring up cherished memories of my past life. Nobokov is an important artist.

Laughter in the dark feels like a Nabokov novel. His trademarks are there, poisonous relationships, Old men doing dirty things, road tripping, a thematic overlay of memory.But it still lacks those quintisential Nobokovicals that set him apart. His dazzling wordplay and refined literary technique, a smooth overlay of irony and his reeling plots that leave me somewhere between delighted and confused.Nabokov is like whiskey, the best stuff is great. The cheap stuff will get the job done anyway. I really enjoyed this novel despite those critics. Nabokov is still the funniest guy in literature, and every page turned is a new joke to learn. The center gets heavy, one character gets a new direction while the other loses a direction. Its the emotional backbone of the novel and very well done.Would reccomend to those interested in learning who Nabokov is when noone is looking.

"Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome."So begins Laughter in the Dark, Vladimir Nabokov's sixth novel published in Berlin in 1933. The brilliance of it is that Nabokov tells you what is going to happen in such a way that he still makes you want to read about it. The only other person who carried off the same trick with similar panache is Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his Chronicle of a History Foretold.Laughter in the Dark is a brilliantly wicked piece set in the movie world of Berlin during the early 1930s. I won't reveal the plot, but suffice it to say that if you've enjoyed Lolita, you should enjoy this novel, which has some interesting parallels. Five stars.

I don’t expect any one will ever read this review, given the high levels of stupidity extant at this time. I’d be surprised if anyone could read at all, very much more so if they were reading stuff like this any more. I might as well be talking to a Shetland Pony, one of those fat little dogs with the curly tails. You’ll all be too busy waiting for the pubs to reopen, queueing up outside McDonald’s/B&Q, doing whatever the fascist govt tells you to, either that or railing against the left wing powers that be, the Beeb and the Marxist mainstream media, your stupid wife, her stupid husband. Desperately searching for someone to farm your ugly, badly behaved children out to, grandparents most likely, despite the risk to their health, despite the fact that they were lousy parents, never mind grandparents, never mind anything and certainly not fancy pants books from about a thousand years ago with loads of words in and no explosions or whatever it is that idiots go in for these days, nationalism and insularity and gender reassignment and all manner of flop that can surely only spell the end.

Albert Albinus is an art critic and aspiring film-maker. He has connections to the Berlin bohemian set of the late 1920’s – but he’s respectable, middle-aged, married to Elisabeth, and has lonely little Irma to look after. He’s also very rich. Given the period and context of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark, the reader might well be preparing for something historical, but pages in, and there’s no indication of economic inflation or power politics. Instead, we learn that Elizabeth is not just of a highly intuitive personality, she’s what might be popularly referred to as psychic. So, she might well have cause to feel uneasy, when we learn that Albinus has developed an obsession with a young cinema usherette.My Penguin Modern Classics copy says on the back; ‘Deadpan and devilishly funny…’ The key word here is ‘devilish.’ Albinus might well be dim-witted and emotionally-immature, but what happens to him, and how, is – in my opinion – not in the least funny, that is unless you’re ready to split your sides at such a man being fleeced by a ‘vulgar little Berlin girl.’ I recall the blurb on Marina Lewycka’s Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian describing it as ‘hilarious.’ Not for this reader it wasn’t. My heart was in my mouth at the suggestion that an elderly man was about to be fleeced by – in that case – a vulgar big Ukrainian girl. The problem is no doubt mine, I am after all, the kind who finds Laurel and Hardy frustrating almost to the point of tears, and anything but funny. In the case of Albinus he's about to be not only fleeced, but cuckolded by the supercilious and sinister film producer Rex; and something much worse befalls him - which you must read in order to find out what – which makes the situation even more upsetting for a reader of an emotionally-nervous disposition such as myself.So much for the book’s emotional impact. Technically, it’s a joy to read. I recall one of my creative writing mentors insisting that Nabokov never wrote a word of prose until he’d built every character, set every scene, worked out what each narrator could hear, smell, taste, touch – hear ye, particularly in the case of this novel! - and this book is no exception to that rule. There are 5 characters; Albinus the dim-witted, Margot the ‘vulgar’, Elizabeth the intuitive, her brother Paul the faithful, and Rex the b******. We briefly meet other characters at a deliciously-narrated supper of bohemians, and have a brush with Margot’s perhaps predictably-truculent brother. Plot-wise it’s ludicrous; lurchingly operatic in its choice of action – I would have expected the competition to be more evenly matched by say Albinus being more streetwise, and I really did anticipate something more searchingly psychological, but it’s ‘early Nabokov’, perhaps was playing safe, and that the more mature the Nabokov, the deeper they get? This is my first Nabokov and I will doubtless be reading more.

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.The prosperous Albert Albinus is married to Elisabeth, but he begins to have a passion for a young cinema usherette called Margot Peters. She had had a promiscuous past, and she encouraged his attentions, especially when she discovered how wealthy he was. Albinus was terrified that Elisabeth would find out; but he was still besotted by Margot. He gave her money to set her up in a flat of her own. She wrote to him, giving its address – but he was out when the letter arrived. Elisabeth opened it, and immediately she and her eight year old daughter left the house before he returned home, to stay with her brother Paul. Disconsolate, Albinus first went over to stay with Margot in the flat he had rented for her; and later they moved into his own home.At a party he threw, one of the guests was a shady character called Axel Rex, a forger of works of art, and who found amusement in being a mischief-maker. It turns out that, two years earlier, when Margot had been an artists’ model, he had been her lover, but he had left her. Now he was pleased to see her again, and became a regular visitor to the house. Margot hoped that the wealthy Albinus would divorce his wife and marry her; but she spent afternoons with Rex in a room he had rented.Albinus suspected nothing. He took Margot on holiday in France, and Rex came with them. In the hotel, too, Margot found more opportunities to deceive Albinus with Rex. Eventually the cuckold found out, and he decided to shoot Margot with a pistol he had always kept in his coat. She talked him out of it, and managed to persuade the besotted man that she had not betrayed him – but he could not bear to see Rex again, and insisted that he and Margot drive home immediately. But he was a terrible driver, had a serious accident and came to in a French hospital. He had gone totally blind.Rex had Margot read to Albinus a letter in which he said he was going to the United States. In fact, he did not. He and Margot found a chalet in the Swiss mountains for Albinus, and Rex moved in also, and silently and with amusement watched Albinus’ devotion to Margot, or, silently, would caress Margot in Albinus’ presence. Margot got Albinus to sign cheques draw cash from his account for household expenses. Albinus could not, of course, read the amount, and Rex had filled in large amounts, most of which were then appropriated by him and Margot.Rex became increasingly careless about not making a sound, while Albinus’ sense of hearing had become stronger in his blindness, and Albinus sometimes thought he could hear the presence of another person.It so happened that Paul and Albinus had the same bank. The bank’s manager was a friend of Paul’s, and showed him the cheques and gave him Albinus’ address in Switzerland. He burst into the chalet. Margot happened to be out, and Rex was at that moment amusing himself by touching Albinus’ face with a blade of grass and watching the blind man swat away at what he thought was a fly. Paul shouted Rex’s name, and everything became horribly clear to Albinus. Rex fled to an upper floor, and Paul rushed Albinus into the taxi that he had kept waiting and drove him back to Berlin and to Elisabeth. Albinus did not utter a word: he seemed to have become dumb as well as blind.The concierge of the Berlin flat Albinus had shared with Margot phoned to say that Margot had turned up there and that he had let her in. Unbelievably, Albinus managed to find a taxi to take him to the flat, found his way into the room in which Margot was collecting her belongings. As he was waving his pistol about and tried to locate her exactly, she managed to seize the weapon, to kill him, and to make her escape back to Rex in France.Although there are improbabilities in the story – especially between the time that Paul had found Albinus in Switzerland and the end of the novel - this is a gripping story of a man’s painful humiliations.

I'm re-reading the great man. I love his supreme cleverness, which he never tries to mask or camouflage. He knows his readers, and the rest can go jump in the Waldsee. There has been no one, there is no one, and there never will be anyone who can match him for the sheer joy of words put together and dangled before the reader like crown jewels (you can look, but you can't touch). Laughter in the Dark is hilarious, sly, gripping, moving, farcical, and, well, brilliant. It's also very good. Read him, enjoy him, revere him. We shall not look on his like again.

The departure of reality where love is present. Alibinus loves Margot but can't see what she's like in spite of the evidence. Nabokov's control of language is mesmerising - cinematic imagery (as in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, eg). Humorous.