Book summary

In this very short novel, Hugh Person is an American who makes four trips to Switzerland representing the publisher he works for. During the first, his father dies, and in subsequent visits things go from bad to worse. He becomes involved in a complicated love affair, a farcical murder by a sleepwalker, and a disastrous fire. Eventually, we discover that the narrator of these events is a dead man, the ex-stepfather of Person's beloved. Nabokov's dreamlike novel is not one of his most celebrated or well-known, and it was almost universally misunderstood when it was published in 1972--the reviews, Nabokov commented, "oscillat[ed] between hopeless adoraton and helpless hatred," but it is considered by Nabokovians to be on a par with LOLITA and PNIN.

Media reviews

"Within the small compass of TRANSPARENT THINGS and the bleak life of Hugh Person, Nabokov ruptures the relationship of reader, character, and author more radically than he has ever done, in order to explore some of his oldest themes: the nature of time; the mystery and privacy of the human soul, and its simultaneous need to breach its solitude; the scope of consciousness beyond death; the possibility of design in the universe."