A deftly written, fantastical novel about obsession. Nabokov writes of a presumably autistic youth's inability to interact with the outside world with the precision of a psychiatrist and the language of an artist. He lets you inside Luzhin's chess-obsessed mind and you can only watch helplessly as he finds a woman to love but can never connect with her. A supremely sad story that under Nabokov's graceful pen becomes something more.