I have to admit, Nabokov’s Mary started a bit slow. I kept rolling back a chapter every week or so without ever pushing over the halfway hump. But I picked up two new books at a used book sale today (the oft-recommended One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love; I didn’t intend such a titular dichotomy, they just happened to be the first two books I laid eyes on), and I needed to finish the one before starting the others. I had no idea that over that halfway hump would be a fairly suspenseful downhill ride through a nostalgic first-love story, one that ends in an unexpected way. As enamored as I am with Nabokov’s dark and poignant character studies, I’m happy to move on to other, non-Russian authors for a while.
Blendor 