Laughter in the Dark
by Vladimir Nabokov, John Banville
Why You'll Love This
Nabokov tells you exactly how this ends on page one — then makes you watch helplessly as every disaster unfolds anyway.
- Great if you want: a cruel, elegant dissection of desire and self-destruction
- The experience: unsettling and compulsive — dread accumulates with every page turned
- The writing: Nabokov's prose is surgical — beautiful sentences delivering maximum cruelty
- Skip if: you need a protagonist worth rooting for even slightly
About This Book
In Weimar-era Berlin, a wealthy, comfortable man throws away everything he has for a beautiful young woman who does not love him. Nabokov lays out this premise in his very first paragraph, stripping away all suspense about outcome so that what remains is something more unsettling: the spectacle of a man dismantling his own life in real time, watched by characters who find his suffering quietly amusing. The stakes are domestic but feel operatic — desire, vanity, cruelty, and self-delusion colliding in a world that has no interest in saving anyone from themselves.
What makes reading this novel such a distinct experience is Nabokov's refusal to let the tragedy become comfortable. His prose is precise and cold and occasionally wickedly funny, and the irony is structural — built into the very way scenes are arranged and information withheld. John Banville's introduction frames the novel's particular darkness with the attentiveness of one stylist recognizing another's methods. The result is a book that rewards close reading not because it hides secrets, but because the writing itself is the event — every sentence doing something slightly more than it appears to.