This is the first story in the collection, since I started reading it again at the end of the summer, which to me is entirely unsatisfying.<--More-->
It is a short piece and the main character is indeed a dragon. Now, I have no objection to stories about animals, nor even fictional animals. There is one story by Kafka which I began to read some months ago about a mole-like creature living in a constant state of anxiety. That was a longer story, and I stalled in reading it. I was reading several things at the same time back then, but the story also failed to sustain my interest. At least, however, I could see what was being expressed. Just as Temple Grandin, who writes about autism and studies animal behaviour, has written about animals and considers that the state of anxiety that aspergic and autistic people tend to experience is redolent of the state she considers most animals experience themselves, Kafka was making a point about humans which raises this story to a level where it demands attention as a part of his oevre. I do object, however, to a reliance on the fantastical to shore up a story. For me, every writer who supplied a positive quotation for that insipid tome The Life of Pi where even the protagonist cannot be named without some phobia of ordinary life getting in the way, is tainted. Here too, just with talking tigers who are said somehow to provide proof of God, the problem was mainly that dragons do not exist and so fail to excite me. But another issue here is that there is little substance to the humans who populate the story in its few pages. Nabokov resorts to some simplistic satire in collapsing the town targeted by the dragon, who finally ventures out of his cave, into a struggle between two tobacco firms. The first puts posters all over the dragon, who sleeps off his indigestion after eating a few people, and then the second, mistaking the dragon for a rubber mock-up provided as a PR stunt sends out a man on a horse dressed up as a knight. This sends the dragon back to his cave in remembrance of the death of his mother. Soon after, he dies.
The problem here is that we have no reason to care about anybody or anything in this story and so the only thing which could conceivably amuse would be the satire, which is pretty broad brush stuff, or the fantasy, which is itself pretty pedestrian, especially with this dragon expiring so easily after no confrontation at all.
Given the satire there is no reason for us to favour one tobacco firm over the other, to salute the inventiveness of one manager over the other, especially given that the death and retreat of the dragon is serendipitous.
I have not yet decided what to make of this author as a short story writer. Of course, I have not yet tackled his great works.