Laughter in the Dark

By Vladimir Nabokov

Amidst a Weimar-era milieu of silent film stars, artists, and aspirants, Nabokov creates a merciless masterpiece as Albinus, an aging critic, falls prey to his own desires, to his teenage mistress, and to Axel Rex, the scheming rival for her affections who finds his greatest joy in the downfall of others.

"Both hilarious and deliciously cruel." -The Guardian

Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307787675

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov (San Petersburgo, 1899-Montreux, 1977), uno de los más extraordinarios escritores del siglo XX, nació en el seno de una acomodada familia aristocrática. En 1919, a consecuencia de la Revolución Rusa, abandonó su país para siempre. Tras estudiar en Cambridge, se instaló en Berlín, donde empezó a publicar sus novelas en ruso con el seudónimo de V. Sirin. En 1937 se trasladó a París, y en 1940 a los Estados Unidos, donde fue profesor de literatura en varias universidades. En 1960, gracias al gran éxito comercial de Lolita, pudo abandonar la docencia, y poco después se trasladó a Montreux, donde residió, junto con su esposa Véra, hasta su muerte. En Anagrama se le ha dedicado una «Biblioteca Nabokov» que recoge una amplísima muestra de su talento narrativo. En «Compactos» se han publicado los siguientes títulos: Mashenka, Rey, Dama, Valet, La defensa, El ojo, Risa en la oscuridad, Desesperación, El hechicero, La verdadera vida de Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pnin, Pálido fuego, Habla, memoria, Ada o el ardor, Invitado a una decapitación y Barra siniestra; La dádiva, Cosas transparentes, Una belleza rusa, El original de Laura y Gloria pueden encontrarse en «Panorama de narrativas», mientras que sus Cuentos completos están incluidos en la colección «Compendium». Opiniones contundentes, por su parte, ha aparecido en «Argumentos».

Reviews for Laughter in the Dark

[cakecop_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent story, well written, great characters.

[jeffome · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wow....enjoyed this way more than i expected! However, it was sort of like watching a horrible train wreck in slow motion.....but it was enticing enough that i thought it cannot continue to go this way....something's gotta give....so i just kept vigorously plowing through.....waiting, hoping......but without giving this away, i was a little surprised by the ending. This is a study of strength & weakness, putting things off so much, there is no ability to go back......a story of pathetic manipulation......and one that is sadly far too common still in today's society.......Emptiness = bad..... recommended if you can handle a little 'dark'.

[robeik_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting short novel, set in the 1930s, mostly in Berlin. The first lines of the book give it away, but how that works itself out is then revealed. A sad story really, and although fiction, I imagine it's the structure of many cases of infidelity and 'affairs'.

[ltbxf4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

You know there is going to be a train wreck, you don't like any of the characters, but you don't look away.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As the narrator of Laughter in the Dark notes, “although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain…a man’s life, detail is always welcome.” Here the details of the life and death of Albert Albinus begin with smug self satisfaction and ennui, degrade into unrequited lust, collapse in fits of self delusion, farce, and debauchery, and end in self recrimination, cuckoldry, and murder. And while you might have been just as enriched by the tombstone version of his life, there is something of a brisk tour-de-force in Nabokov’s willingness to give himself over to the absurdities of his plot and, more especially, of his characters.Albert is a middle-aged man in Berlin between the wars, who is comfortably middle-class. But his predilection is for very young women — very young — and despite restraining that impulse throughout his marriage to Elizabeth, he is tempted when he encounters young Margot ushering at a local cinema. To Albert she is all that innocence implies. Alas, Margot is far less, or more, and quickly settles on Albert as her ticket out of poverty and possibly into life on the other side of the silver screen. It’s all a bit sordid but mundane. However, when Margot’s first and only true love, Axel, turns up, complications ensue. Fortunately Axel is quite willing to borrow Margot’s affection at Albert’s expense and their shenanigans engender the laughter in the dark of the title.This is a light romp that doesn’t stand up against Nabokov’s more serious comedies. But it does reveal that even early in his career he was already full of mirth at the expense of many of his characters and quite willing to point the finger at his readers as well.

[numbernine-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nabakov is about as good as it gets, and Laughter in the Dark might be my favorite book of his so far. Awful things happening to thoroughly unlikeable people.

[gergacheck · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Laughter in the Dark is in many ways Nabokov's rehearsal for the great American works of his later period of English writing. Plot-wise, we get a version of the middle-aged-man-paired-with-a-significantly-younger-girl-which-ends-with-a-murder scenario and the elaborate charades found in Lolita, as well as the obsessive descriptions of love found in Ada. This early novel, however, doesn't quite have the style of the familiar Nabokov--the tenderness, the care, the prose's exquisite frivolity and playfullness--but is still nevertheless thoroughly enjoyable. Perhaps something of the indulgence felt in his originally English works is lost in the translation from the Russian here, but I get the feeling that Nabokov's style was still emerging, not yet consumed by the sensuousness of language. In later Nabokov we get the complexity and elaborate jive of Lolita, the cleverness and ambiguity of Pale Fire, and the voluptuous and almost sublime language of Ada--but not here, not quite arrived at yet in Laughter in the Dark. Of course none of this means that you shouldn't read this work; just don't expect to get everything Nabokov gives you in his mature, English works. So read it, please. After all, this is still Nabokov we're talking about here.

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love the opening line to “Laughter in the Dark”, which pretty much sums it up:“Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man’s life, detail is always welcome.”Some of that detail: Albinus ends up completely used by Margot, his young lover. He does ridiculous things, like missing his own daughter’s funeral. She cheats on him in turn with Rex, who takes full advantage and pushes the limit sadistically. One feels pity for Albinus as he quite literally ends up in the dark, mocked and utterly humiliated; on the other hand, there is a sense of justice in the cuckolding. Quotes:On beauty:“And alongside of these feeble romances there had been hundreds of girls of whom he had dreamed but whom he had never got to know; they had just slid past him, leaving for a day or two that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is: a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge; a thing quite impossible to capture.”I love this playful description of somewhat random items from a wedding:“They were married in Munich in order to escape the onslaught of their many Berlin acquaintances. The chestnuts were in full bloom. A much treasured cigarette case was lost in a forgotten garden. One of the waiters at the hotel could speak seven languages. Elisabeth proved to have a tender little scar – the result of appendicitis.”On a reality check in the May-September romance:“In a passing mirror he saw a pale grave gentleman walking beside a schoolgirl in her Sunday dress. Cautiously, he stroked her smooth arm and the glass drew dim.”On sex:“This had been the night of which he had dreamed for years. The very way in which she had drawn her shoulder blades together and purred when he first kissed her downy back had told him that he would get exactly what he wanted, and what he wanted was not the chill of innocence. As in his most reckless visions, everything was permissible; a puritan’s love, priggish reserve, was less known in this new free world than white bears in Honolulu.Her nudity was as natural as though she had long been wont to run along the shore of his dreams. There had been something delightfully acrobatic about her bed manners. And afterward she would skip out and prance up and down the room, swinging her girlish hips and gnawing at a dry roll left over from supper.”On settling:“To Margot’s credit it must be admitted that she did try her utmost to remain quite faithful to him. But not matter how tender and thoughtful he was in his love-making, she knew, all along, that for her it would always be love minus something, whereas the least touch of her first lover had always been a sample of everything.”On the shock of discovering an affair:“He had the obscure sensation of everything’s being suddenly turned the other way round, so that he had to read it all backward if he wanted to understand. It was a sensation devoid of any pain or astonishment. It was simply something dark and looming, and yet smooth and soundless, coming toward him; and there he stood, in a kind of dreamy, helpless stupor, not even trying to avoid that ghostly impact, as if it were some curious phenomenon which could do him no harm so long as this stupor lasted.”

[dylanwolf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nabakov perhaps at his most playful - Laughter In the Dark is an exceedingly fanciful but wonderfully lively and accessible novel. A good place I think to start reading him. This preposterous story contains early examples of the dazzling games and word magicianship of Nabakov. This is lighter (in style) and darker (in topic) novel than some of the more demanding Nabakovian reads. Laughter In the Dark starts as a fairy story and so warns us at the outset not to take it too seriously. In Nabakov characters often fall foul of a folly of their own making or of their own weaknesses. Albinus has those in spades.

[carlosmcrey_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An early Nabokov novel about a man named Albinus, a well-to-do German businessman who becomes infatuated with a callow younger woman. There are some similarities here with Pandora's Box or 'Der Blaue Engel' (for fans of Weimar Cinema) in this story of a rather pompous individual brought low by his romantic entanglement with a younger woman.Overall, it's a fairly tragic story, as Albinus loses first his marriage, then his daughter, then, in quick succession, his sight, dignity, fortune and life. It has its moments of humor and unique prose. Though hardly as brilliant or radical as Nabokov's later works, Laughter in the Dark is still a well-crafted narrative of one man's folly. 

[karlus_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Of all Nabokov's varied novels, this one might best be summarized with the single thought, "page-turner." And what a page-turner it is!When a respectably-married and wealthy middle-aged man catches sight of an attractive 16-year-old female usher in a Berlin movie house, all life changes and is no longer the same for anyone. As friends and relatives, crooks and scam artists, bus drivers and acquaintances enter the picture, and plot twists and surprises follow one another on nearly every page, the reader soon finds himself almost breathless trying to keep up with the perfidy that unfolds.In this book, in a different narrative style from many of the author's other novels, the story emerges rapidly and moves right along in short clear sentences. Nabokov allows the point-of-view to shift quickly among the principal characters as we catch them in mid-conversation and hear their thoughts directly in first-person. Soon enough, we know all about the good guys and the bad guys and, in effect, we see all the plot puzzle-pieces face up on the table. When a gun suddenly appears, then the stakes are raised, and it becomes a serious task for the reader to try to foresee the end of the story and how the puzzle will all fit together.Come then, if you wish, and try your hand against the Master Puzzler. Guess the end, if you can -- before he tells you, of course.

[szarka_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Scarier than any horror novel could be. More thrilling than any thriller, despite being told the end at the start.