Ada's review of A Matter of Chance, by Vladimir Nabokov
Aleksey Luzhin works in the dining car of the Berlin-Paris express train, attending to passengers while lost in a cocaine-fuelled fog of longing for his home and his wife, Lena, whom he left behind in St. Petersburg. At the depths of his despair at the unlikelyhood of ever seeing Lena again, Luzhin's depression suddenly lifts when he decides to end his life.
In meticulous detail, Luzhin plans out the date, time and method of his self-murder. On the night of August 1st, he will place his head firmly against the buffer of one train car, and wait for it to be crushed by the buffer of the next car as it attempts to couple on.
Needless to say, Luzhin's plans, and his entire life, are foiled by a series of minor derailments. On August 1st, Lena is on the train, but Luzhin fails to deliver the dining car slips so he doesn't know. Lena doesn't get on the dining car because she doubles back to find her lost wedding ring which another attendant finds, but in the dim light cannot make out the engraving of Luzhin's name. When the dining car is uncoupled for cleaning, Luzhin steps out of the car intending to execute his plan. He hops off the platform onto the tracks, and all his painstaking gruesome plans are abbreviated instantly when he's flattened by a through train.
This is a blackly humorous story. Interesting in that Nabokov takes us into the machinations and mental ricochet of a drug addict. One wonders if Uncle Vlad himself may have dabbled. As always there is the recurring theme of exile and grief over the loss of one's home and family. Then there's the symbolism of the express train standing in for the futility and frustration of always moving but never getting anywhere.
Overall, I wasn't as wounded or elated or grief-stricken at this story as I was at Wingstroke or the Woodsprite. I'd even go as far as saying it isn't as well written. Perhaps it's because too much depends on a carefully plotted series of events as opposed to a situation that unfolds more unpredictably based on a character's actions and reactions.
Ah well, you know what they say about bad pizza (or bad sex, but I can't bring myself to compare Nabokov to bad sex, ever).
