The writer Nabokov is almost synonymous with his masterpiece Lolita, but he’s written many other fantastic books. Before he started writing in English (around 1940) Nabokov had published nine novels in his native Russian. After the enormous commercial success of Lolita his Russian books started appearing in authorised translations (translated by his son Dmitri), so for a while you had two steady streams of new Nabokov publications competing with each other.
The Eye was originally published in 1930. Thirty-five years later it finally appeared in English. “The story weaved its pleasant way through three installments of Playboy in the first months of 1965,” Nabokov writes in the introduction of this first edition. It’s set among a group of Russian émigrés in Berlin and centers around the mysterious identity of a man called Smurov who, in typical Nabokov fashion, might be the first-person narrator and who might actually be dead…