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.