Look at the Harlequins!

Title: Look at the Harlequins!
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Fiction: 1693418
ISBN: 9780679727286
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1990
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: Reissue
Section: Fiction | Literary
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher Description: A dying man cautiously unravels the mysteries of memory and creation. Vadim is a Russian émigré who, like Nabokov, is a novelist, poet and critic. There are threads linking the fictional hero with his creator as he reconstructs the images of his past from young love to his serious illness. - "Good farce throbbing with his well-known obsessions." -V.S. Pritchett, The New York Review

'Look at the harlequins ... Play! Invent the world! Invent reality'.

This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US. Now dying, he reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Annette his long-necked typist, and Bel his daughter, as well as his own bizarre illness, 'numerical nimbus syndrome'.