Transparent Things
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Time is a treacherous and transparent membrane in Vladimir Nabokov's slim but staggering novella, Transparent Things, a work that chronicles the four visits of Hugh Person — a hapless, grief-prone American — to Switzerland, a country that becomes the stage for love, loss, murder, and the ghostly persistence of the past. Narrated by an unnamed spectral presence that observes Hugh from beyond the grave, the novel unfolds with the cool, clinical precision of a coroner's report and the shimmering beauty of a fever dream, as the narrative voice slips freely between time periods and consciousnesses to reveal the uncanny layers embedded in every ordinary object. Nabokov, the consummate architect of metafiction, constructs a meditation on memory, mortality, and the nature of narrative itself — themes that haunt all his major works, from Lolita to Ada. His prose here is at its most distilled: lapidary, ironic, and suffused with a melancholy wit that never tips into sentimentality. Transparent Things stands as one of the most formally daring works of the twentieth century, a novel that rewards patient, attentive readers with the unsettling revelation that the past is never truly past — it is merely waiting, just beneath the surface of things.
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Format: Hardback
Published: 1973, Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Time is a treacherous and transparent membrane in Vladimir Nabokov's slim but staggering novella, Transparent Things, a work that chronicles the four visits of Hugh Person — a hapless, grief-prone American — to Switzerland, a country that becomes the stage for love, loss, murder, and the ghostly persistence of the past. Narrated by an unnamed spectral presence that observes Hugh from beyond the grave, the novel unfolds with the cool, clinical precision of a coroner's report and the shimmering beauty of a fever dream, as the narrative voice slips freely between time periods and consciousnesses to reveal the uncanny layers embedded in every ordinary object. Nabokov, the consummate architect of metafiction, constructs a meditation on memory, mortality, and the nature of narrative itself — themes that haunt all his major works, from Lolita to Ada. His prose here is at its most distilled: lapidary, ironic, and suffused with a melancholy wit that never tips into sentimentality. Transparent Things stands as one of the most formally daring works of the twentieth century, a novel that rewards patient, attentive readers with the unsettling revelation that the past is never truly past — it is merely waiting, just beneath the surface of things.