Look at the Harlequins!

 I have just finished a very slow, fitful reread of Look at the Harlequins!, Nabokov's last novel (unless you count the posthumous fragments published as The Original of Laura). It must be more than forty years since I first read it, and my memories were vague and not particularly happy. Would I enjoy it any more on second reading? The answer, alas, was (spoiler alert) No. It is a very strange book, a kind of autobiographical fantasia purportedly written by a novelist who is clearly a version of Nabokov himself, in many ways almost his double, in others notably different. LATH is written in the richly ornate style of Ada, but is less coherent, far less ambitious, and has a quite different, generally cooler (less ardent) tone. Thematically, I suppose, it is closest to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, another, much more successful experiment in (auto)biography. It seems Nabokov wrote LATH partly as a result of the traumatic experience of being biographised by Andrew Field, who he thought had at some profound level falsified his life story – indeed Nabokov tried to stop the resultant biography being published. This experience seems to have impelled him to restore his equilibrium by plunging again into autobiography, this time in the form of a first-person novel.
  There is some fun to be had in teasing out the parallels between the life and works of LATH's 'author', Vadim Vadimovich N, and Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. This extends even to N's novels, as listed on the title-page verso: See Under Real (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight), Dr Olga Repnin (Pnin), A Kingdom by the Sea (Lolita), Ardis (Ada), etc. N's distinguishing peculiarity is a curious condition that makes him unable to mentally turn around: he can do it physically, of course, but to think, to mentally envisage a return journey, even of a matter of yards, throws him into some kind of existential panic. As is pointed out to him near the end of the book, he has confused distance with duration, going back in space with going back in time. Which is not terribly interesting really. 
  As with any Nabokov novel, there are small pleasures, mostly stylistic, along the way: he is incapable of writing a dull sentence (even when one might be a welcome relief), and there are passages, mostly near the beginning, that have something of the familiar magic. Overall, however, LATH looks like an under-controlled exercise in self-indulgence, a novel he should perhaps not have published. Transparent Things, published a couple of years earlier, would have been the perfect climax to one of the 20th century's great literary careers.