Skolimowski's erratic, piecemeal, yet distinctly Nabokovian adaptation of King, Queen, Knave seems subsequently to have been abandoned to its own hermetic limbo; one of those freakishly unreal landscapes that Skolimowski has scattered across the continent….

Skolimowski thus adds his own twist to Nabokov's explanation of how, in dealing with German characters in a German setting, his ignorance of all things German 'answered my dream of pure invention'; and the film slyly demonstrates that the Nabokovian mechanics are still in good working order, though in the hands of a new engineer. (p. 53)

Centred vaguely on the efforts of the mad inventor commissioned by Dreyer to develop mechanical mannequins out of his bizarre discovery of a perfect rubber substitute for skin, Nabokov's ironic manipulations of his characters emphasised how, in their respective dreams and schemes, they reduced each other to dummies, playing-cards, inanimate articles, and worse. More eccentric in his...