Finishing Mary

It's a simple book in many respects.  It takes place physically in a boarding room and features a cast of Russian emigres.  The bulk of the text however takes place in Ganin's head as he remembers his first love back in Russia.  Their story is filled in with flashbacks as Ganin is sitting in his room or wandering the streets of Berlin.  His memory and longing for Mary is stirred by a picture shown to him by one of the other borders.  It is a picture of Mary and the other man says that this is his wife and she is arriving in 5 days.
It is translated by someone else and it does seem to lack some of the careful linguistic color that Nabokov uses when he writes in English.

From the beginning

When I was in my mid-20's I read something by Nabokov, I actually don't remember what it was anymore, and it bowled me over so much that I begin buying everything I could find of his.  Within a couple of years I had read everything that had been published at that point.  In the intervening 30+ years I have picked up and read this or that, rereading at some point, Lolita, and perhaps Despair but not much else other then a copy of his collected short stories given to me by Betsy for a birthday.  For the past several years I have been in a rereading mood and have thought I would like to enjoy his complete works, in chronological order.   I thought I would record some of my impressions.  We'll see how long that resolve holds.

A look at this simple Wikipedia bibliography shows that I still have almost all of these books.  The only ones I can't find are those couple that hadn't been published and the very first one, Mary.  It was a very simple mass market paperback of an attractive young woman on the cover, probably an attempt by the publisher to capitalize on Lolita fame though in my memory it was a far cry from Lolita.  I'll look for it.