Heer, vrouw, boer

"Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest," writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Foreword to this revised and first English-language edition of a classic story.

The setting is Berlin in the late 1920s: "An unprepossessing sullen little café…a lady in a moleskin coat…a young man in tortoise-shell glasses, sipping cherry brandy and gazing into each other's eyes."

The lady in the fur coat is Martha Dreyer. The myopic young man is Franz, her bumbling lover and her husband's nephew. Her husband, oblivious to their meeting, plods on with his money-making schemes. Martha, "strictly adhering to every rule of adultery," is clumsily plotting her husband's murder so that she and Franz may live happily forever after on his money.

Husband, wife, paramour—the classic triangle but, as in any Nabokov novel, the geometry is hardly plane. As soon as Martha decides on the murderous solution the strange and hilarious workings of the god of chance begin. Plot and subplot start their intricate courtship, and one of the most icily brilliant novels you have ever read is well underway.

King, Queen, Knave will long remain the masterful, comic statement on classic bourgeois romance by the man whom Eliot Fremont-Smith has called "the greatest literary artist working today."