The Luzhin Defense and Lurkers

 I read Nabokov's third Russian novel The Luzhin Defence while on vacation in Penang, after picking up the book in Kuala Lumpur. The novel is very enjoyable. There is a deep paradox in Nabokov's treatment of his chess-playing protagonist: it is at once warm and cold. The warmth comes from the Bildungsroman mode, the loving recreation of a Russian setting, the tender analysis of exile, the sympathetic understanding of artistic passion. The cold comes from the art of fiction itself, since the author knows that his fictional creation cannot escape whatever fate he is designing for him. The logic of chess underlines, in this novel, the logic of fiction.

Appropriately, I started reading Sandi Tan's novel Lurkers when I returned from Malaysia to Singapore. Appropriately because Sandi grew up in Singapore. Her first novel The Black Isle is obviously based on Singapore. It is nothing like any Singaporean novels that I have read. She has lived in Los Angeles county for many years now, and I read Lurkers as her American novel. As in The Black Isle and her film Shirkers, the most compelling relationship in this new novel is that between a charismatic older man and an impressionable adolescent girl. The Korean parents do not rise above familiar types, although the novel's ending gives the mother an unexpected warmth. The aging gay horror writer is a caricature rather than a character, and his eventual adoption of the Korean girls quite incredible. The attempt to give a medieval cast to the modern set-up—the epigraph from Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages speaks of life running to the extremes—does not quite stick. The writing is lively, funny, and naughty, so the novel is an enjoyable read, but it lacks the intensities of The Black Isle.