King, Queen, Knave
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: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: No markings
A darkly comic and psychologically acute novel, King, Queen, Knave chronicles the entanglement of three figures — a wealthy merchant, his bored and beautiful wife, and his naive young nephew — in a web of lust, manipulation, and cold-blooded scheming. Originally written in Russian in 1928 and later revised by Nabokov himself for its English translation, the novel presents its characters as near-automata, puppets moved by desire and self-delusion rather than genuine human feeling. With the precision of a chess master, Nabokov constructs an ironic, almost farcical tragedy set against the glittering backdrop of a German resort town, where the gap between surface elegance and moral vacancy is rendered with devastating wit. The prose is cool and stylized, illustrating the author's signature detachment — a god-like authorial gaze that simultaneously mocks and pities its creations. Readers familiar with Nabokov's later masterworks will recognize here the early crystallization of his themes: the unreliability of perception, the cruelty of desire, and the absurdity of human pretension.
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Format: Hardback
Published: 1968, McGraw-Hill Book Company
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
Markings: No markings
A darkly comic and psychologically acute novel, King, Queen, Knave chronicles the entanglement of three figures — a wealthy merchant, his bored and beautiful wife, and his naive young nephew — in a web of lust, manipulation, and cold-blooded scheming. Originally written in Russian in 1928 and later revised by Nabokov himself for its English translation, the novel presents its characters as near-automata, puppets moved by desire and self-delusion rather than genuine human feeling. With the precision of a chess master, Nabokov constructs an ironic, almost farcical tragedy set against the glittering backdrop of a German resort town, where the gap between surface elegance and moral vacancy is rendered with devastating wit. The prose is cool and stylized, illustrating the author's signature detachment — a god-like authorial gaze that simultaneously mocks and pities its creations. Readers familiar with Nabokov's later masterworks will recognize here the early crystallization of his themes: the unreliability of perception, the cruelty of desire, and the absurdity of human pretension.