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Laughter in the Dark/Agatha Christie
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Recently someone posted an article about the first lines of Nabokov's "Laughter in the Dark."(1932)
While reading a collection of Agatha Christie's short-stories ("While the Light Lasts") in Portuguese, I was struck by the similarity in their laconic beginnings or with their eery suspense, through madness and dream-life.
Nabokov insistently mocked Agatha Christie's plots ( cf.RLSK, or the EW/VN letters) but he must have read at least some of her stories ( those featuring Harley Quinn, for example, with their play of stained-glass on his common-place clothes; "The Mousetrap" or "And then there were none"), while he lived in England.
Young Agatha's first short-story (written before WWI with the title "House of Beauty" and signed as Agatha Miller) was later reprinted as "Dream House" ("A Casa dos Sonhos") in January 1926 (Sovereign Magazine). It has been compared with the ghost stories written by E.F.Benson (*).
Laughter in The Dark (opening paragraph):
"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."
Dream House (opening paragraph, in a rough translation)
"This is the story of John Segrave - his life, which was unsatisfactory; his love, which had been insufficient; his dreams and his death. If in the last two items he's found what has been denied to him in the preceding two then, his life, inspite of everything else, could be considered a success. Who knows?"
..............
* wiki: H. P. Lovecraft spoke highly of Benson's works in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature", most notably of his story "The Man Who Went Too Far" . A critical essay on Benson's ghost stories appears in S. T. Joshi's book The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004). Further "Mapp and Lucia" books have been written by Tom Holt and Guy Fraser-Sampson.
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While reading a collection of Agatha Christie's short-stories ("While the Light Lasts") in Portuguese, I was struck by the similarity in their laconic beginnings or with their eery suspense, through madness and dream-life.
Nabokov insistently mocked Agatha Christie's plots ( cf.RLSK, or the EW/VN letters) but he must have read at least some of her stories ( those featuring Harley Quinn, for example, with their play of stained-glass on his common-place clothes; "The Mousetrap" or "And then there were none"), while he lived in England.
Young Agatha's first short-story (written before WWI with the title "House of Beauty" and signed as Agatha Miller) was later reprinted as "Dream House" ("A Casa dos Sonhos") in January 1926 (Sovereign Magazine). It has been compared with the ghost stories written by E.F.Benson (*).
Laughter in The Dark (opening paragraph):
"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."
Dream House (opening paragraph, in a rough translation)
"This is the story of John Segrave - his life, which was unsatisfactory; his love, which had been insufficient; his dreams and his death. If in the last two items he's found what has been denied to him in the preceding two then, his life, inspite of everything else, could be considered a success. Who knows?"
..............
* wiki: H. P. Lovecraft spoke highly of Benson's works in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature", most notably of his story "The Man Who Went Too Far" . A critical essay on Benson's ghost stories appears in S. T. Joshi's book The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004). Further "Mapp and Lucia" books have been written by Tom Holt and Guy Fraser-Sampson.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/