...her blazing arms crossed on her chest, her misty head inclined, emanating a fierce chestnut heat, losing, losing the layer of violet that disintegrated into ashes under his terrible, unnoticed gaze.

In addition, the protagonist's impressions are spiced with cynical wit. Unable to perceive his bulbous new bride as his "wife," he refers to her simply as "the person," a "cumbersome behemoth" who stares at him intently with her "two eyes and wart."

Especially inventive are Nabokov's condensed metaphors, like those in the poetry of imagists such as Ezra Pound. Eerie images flash through the half-aware mind. In the midst of a frenzy of frustrated desire, the protagonist fleetingly notes that the morning's newspaper is dated the 32nd. When the sleepy little girl is led into the hotel, she watches a "doubling cat" through her blurred vision.

At one point, while courting the child's mother, the enchanter sees a glimmer of his fate "silently indicated to him by what looked like a strange naill finger." Sometimes remote, sometimes sinister, sometimes humorous, these imagist puzzles are strangely evocative, as well as tantalizing to decipher.

THOUGH HE IS no Humbert, the chilling "enchanter" is engaging in his own right. Like other protagonists in Nabokov's work, the precise, thinlipped jeweler is probably mad, as he indulges more and more in his wolvish fantasies. Yet, at the same time, his constant introspection reveals a natural need for self-justification and an odd paternal longing.

Unwillingly, we find ourselves developing sympathy for a childmolester, as we follow the highly suspenseful course of events which we know is leading him inexorably towards disaster. The enchanter's plight culminates in a surrealistic scene of warped eroticism.

FATE, CRUEL AND derisive, always seems to trap the errant. In the fiction of Nabokov, this fate is the will of the author who is empowered by his art to create his characters and coolly plan out their destinies. He operates them like marionettes, then drops their strings and watches them collapse. Thus he deals with the enchanter.

The interweaving of some of these themes, the webs of imagery, the elegant prose with its pricks of irony and cadences of poetry, all make The Enchanter a worthwhile read. Admittedly it is one of the author's lesser works, a weak prototype of Lolita.

But The Enchanter is hardly the "dead scrap" that Nabokov called it when he first wrote it in Paris. The short novel has the appeal of the author's distinct style. It demonstrates his method of patterning fiction which, in Nabokov's words, combines "the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way."