Nearly 70 short stories fill this volume, which is supposed to be all of Nabokov’s known short stories. I read most of these over the last few weeks of December, leaving only a handful to finish up in 2011.

I’ve read a lot of Nabokov over the years, and while I have the utmost respect for everything the guy writes, I find myself pretty divided on what I enjoy and don’t enjoy. I’m particularly fond of his earlier works, and less fond of the latter, mostly because I believe his more recent novels tend to sacrifice story for style. Nabokov is a stylistic genius, but I do think at times he lets that go to his head and goes a little overboard on style. I don’t remember where I found it, but I read an article once where he was quoted as saying the story was less important to him than the way the words fit together, and that makes perfect sense with what I’ve read by him. My favorites of his are when words and plot and character all come together to balance each other out.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find a lot of that in these short stories. In story after story, the language was beautiful, poetic, and sometimes so thick that I had a hard time finding my way through it. But at the same time, I felt Nabokov often just didn’t have time to put together enough plot and character to make all that beautiful language feel worthwhile to me. To others, perhaps, but not to me, because all three of those elements are important to me, and I don’t feel like he reaches his full potential in most of this volume. Maybe I’m just ignorant and maybe most of the stories just went over my head. I’ll be the first to admit that Nabokov is a million times more intelligent than I am! But at the same time, I couldn’t help it: I was bored. A lot.

The nice thing, though, was that slogging through almost 70 stories that I didn’t really enjoy, I would occasionally come across one that appealed to me, and they seemed brighter for the dullness around them. There were four in particular that I really, really enjoyed and I’m going to touch on each of them briefly instead of spending any more time discussing the collection as a whole. These are in the order they appear in the collection, not in preference order.

The Thunderstorm: This had to be the most beautifully written story in the entire collection. Perhaps it helps that I love thunderstorms and Nabokov really captured the feel of all that static in the air, the anticipation, the way your heart starts shivering as the storm rolls in. My favorite line in the collection came from this story: I was intoxicated by those bluish tremors, by the keen, volatile chill. I went up to the wet window ledge and inhaled the unearthly air, which made my heart ring like glass.

The Return of Chorb: An interesting little story about a man whose wife dies on their honeymoon, and how he can’t bring himself to tell her parents what happened. The muted grief, drowning in a state of semi-denial, was so well done here, and the ending chilled me. This was the best story for mood and tone.

Lips to Lips: This was probably my favorite of all the stories. It’s about a writer trying to get published, who gets buoyed up only to be disillusioned in a brutal way. It opens with a section of the man’s writing, with correction marks and everything, and my heart twisted for him as he went on what is obviously, to the reader, a naive and dangerous path. He was my favorite character and the one I connected with most in the collection.

The Word: It could be a dream, a vision, or a hallucination, but however you interpret it, the imagery was the most beautiful of all the stories I read.

I wish there had been more here that I loved, but I’m content with four.