Something of an ode to Russian literature. Very well styled.

I hesitate to give anything by Nabokov such a low rating, but I found the Gift to be stuffy, pretentious, tedious, and at times downright dull. Admittedly, I am not well acquainted with 19th century Russian literature. Having an in depth knowledge and appreciation of the likes of Pushkin, Gogol, and Chernyshevsky is a prerequisite for enjoyment of the Gift. You will otherwise be lost with all the namedropping and style referencing. There are, of course, bits of Nabokov brilliance that shine through for the average reader. A passage here and there that makes the heart soar or elicits spontaneous laughter. The book's structure is itself a piece of art. Pay attention to the subtle shifts in point of view which serve as cues that you are reading a book within a book (within a book). Those small rewards were only just enough to keep me going.

A gift indeed.

Spoiler

Good-by, my book! Like mortal eyes,
imagined ones must close some day.
Onegin from his knees will rise—
but his creator strolls away.
And yet the ear cannot right now
part with the music and allow
the tale to fade; the chords of fate
itself continue to vibrate;
and no obstruction for the sage
exists where I have put The End:
the shadows of my world extend
beyond the skyline of the page,
blue as tomorrow’s morning haze—
nor does this terminate the phrase.

I see why chapter 4 was excluded from the first round of publication, it is tedious. I liked the rest of the book, but chapter 4 brought the whole work down.

I don't understand anything bc i can't read my url is a lie

Tremendous. It requires attention and it lost me at times, as I was dodging puddles on the back streets, and Künstlerroman is not really my genre and I don't know nearly enough about Russian literature to fully appreciate what Nabokov is up to (and the best thing about that is that he clearly just doesn't care whether I get it or not) but wandering along and getting a bit lost in, especially, Chernyshevsky's life and thinking about other things, I was more than once hauled up and made to pay attention by the clarity, compassion and beauty of some long passage. The butterflies-- oh--

The bit on synaesthesia fairly knocked me over one grey evening. The sibilant S of the sapphires and the sobbing mother will be vividly associated for me with a tight, dirty bottle-neck near the fruit shop lit by candles among the persimmons, where one little hand-built house sticks its dirty concrete elbow out into the road and across from it another of unfinished bricks totters and overhangs in an Ottoman style and threatens to collapse with the first tremor, and the drain covers are long gone and the bicycle Roma squeeze past with their monstrous loads of plastic scavenged from the skips.

Or rather, that corner is now sapphires. Extraordinary. Nabokov can change how you view the world.

While slow going and dense, this book leaves one astonished at Nabokov's virtuoso performance.

I started this over a month ago. After about a week of reading, I needed a break. I decided break time was over and finished it all up. Nabokov is always playful and difficult and charming. He's the perfect first date: flirty and filthy. That being said, this isn't one of Nabokov's I would take out after a second or third date.

The book drags in some sections, but I can't bring myself to knock off a star for it. It's more than made up for elsewhere, and works perfectly as a whole. Might be my favorite of Nabokov's Russian novels.