never in my life have i wanted to kill kill kill maim destroy a narrator more than this annoying ass kinbote motherfucker. anyway what a book! a rich blend of literary fiction and fantasy. a strange and wonderful new shape for a story. sometimes a person looks into literature seeking a crystal mirror or a still lake or the facetune app… many such cases, all of them bad. 

nabokov is a titan of delusional narration within a prose sometimes so pretty it makes your teeth hurt. and to compliment that the plot is pacy even as the dread creeps slowly along. the parallel of gradus' approach and the poem's growth is so neat and ominous! i am maybe a bit stupid and did not clock the Botkin thing until reading about the book later, but very awesome… 

in my last review of drive your plow i mentioned how izma said mysteries often have great premises and then anticlimactic conclusions. total opposite here. very neatly laid cards that still surprise you.