Nabokov's writing is sophisticated in the way that good music is sophisticated: we have not only to remember the theme, but to be able to recognize it when it reappears in another key, rhythmically altered, inverted, or combined with other themes…. [Reading] Nabokov is an active process of making connections between different parts of the text: we become not mere readers, but finders of the narrative. (pp. 220-21)
Transparent Things is not the most difficult of Nabokov's works, but its concentrated brevity makes it the most exemplary: what we have to do in order to read the other novels we must do in an exaggerated fashion in order to read Transparent Things. It is notable for its almost relentless internal allusiveness … the system of "recurrences, correspondences, and coincidences" that runs throughout the typical Nabokov novel…. Instead of the smooth and seemingly natural one-directional flow from sentence to sentence in the well-made novel, we must constantly move back and forth within the text. (pp. 222-23)
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