 Brilliant Sadeo presents the unabridged recording of Lafter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov, performed by Luke Daniels. Tuvera. One. Once upon a time, there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy. One day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress. He loved, was not loved, and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story, and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling. And although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man's life, detail is always welcome. It so happened that one night Albinus had a beautiful idea. True, it was not quite his own, as it had been suggested by a phrase in Conrad. Not the famous pole, but Udo Conrad, who wrote the memoirs of a forgetful man, and that other thing about the old conjurer who spirited himself away at his farewell performance. In any case, he made it his own by liking it, playing with it, letting it grow upon him, and that goes to make lawful property in the free city of the mind. As an art critic and picture expert, he had often amused himself by having this or that old master sign landscapes and faces which he, Albinus, came across in real life. It turned his existence into a fine picture gallery, delightful fakes all of them. Then one night, as he was giving his learned mind a holiday and writing a little essay, nothing very brilliant, he was not a particularly gifted man, upon the art of the cinema, the beautiful idea came to him. It had to do with colored animated drawings, which had just begun to appear at the time. How fascinating it would be, he thought, if one could use this method for having some well-known picture, preferably of the Dutch school, perfectly reproduced on the screen in vivid colors and then brought to life, movement and gesture graphically developed in complete harmony with their static state in the picture. Say, a pothouse with little people drinking lustily at wooden tables and a sunny glimpse of a courtyard with saddled horses, all suddenly coming to life with that little man in red putting down his tankard, this girl with the tray wrenching herself free, and a hen beginning to peck on the threshold. It could be continued by having the little figures come out and then pass through the landscape of the same painter, with perhaps a brown sky and a frozen canal, and people on the quaint skates they used then, sliding about in the old fashioned curves suggested by the picture, or a wet road in the mist and a couple of riders. Finally, returning to the same tavern, little by little bringing the figures and light into the self-same order, settling them down, so to speak, and ending it all with the first picture. Then too, you could try the Italian.