Transparent Things.

Transparent Things (1972) is the penultimate novel of Vladimir Nabokov — written between 1969 and 1972, when he was seventy-three years old and living in his celebrated suite at the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland — and one of the most formally concentrated and metaphysically haunting works of his late period. The novel follows Hugh Person, a somnambulant American editor, whose four visits to Switzerland over two decades are narrated by an ethereal presence — the ghost of a novelist known only as R. — who haunts Person as an author haunts his characters, threading together the deaths of fathers, the accidental killing of a wife, a prison sentence, and a final return to the Alpine landscape charged with memory and loss. The book's central preoccupation — the permeability of the boundary between the living and the dead, the way the past persists within and beneath the surfaces of the present — is announced on its celebrated opening page, where the narrator instructs the reader to let the transparent thing reveal the thicker, more opaque past it contains. Written as the sixteenth of Nabokov's seventeen novels, Transparent Things offered a sharp contrast to its predecessor Ada — short, austere, and built around a bumbling and inept protagonist rather than a brilliantly gifted one.