These publishing initiatives by Penguin Books – short selections at the cost of £1 – are commendable and I was eager to sample a little more of Nabokov just a few months after reading his masterpiece Lolita. The three stories here – 'The Aurelian', 'Signs and Symbols' and 'Lance' – provide things to chew on but you'll have to work your jaw to get at them. The florid prosing, high-literary bent and lapses into French which I accepted as part of the charm of Lolita (and part of Humbert Humbert's self-regard) in fact seem to be regular characteristics of Nabokov's style, regardless of the story he is telling. It can prove a hurdle and you read it knowing you have to focus if you want to get anything out of it.

None of the stories leap out at you and Nabokov does not spoon-feed the reader. Nevertheless, if you work them over for a time you can begin to see the purpose behind each of them. 'The Aurelian' follows an amateur butterfly-collector with a dull, featureless existence. The protagonist's development over the story can be seen as mirroring a butterfly's metamorphosis from larva to chrysalis to an insect capable of flight, and once you realize this you begin to see the point of the story.

The other two stories have similarly deep-rooted purposes validating prose that can, on the surface, seem bewildering. 'Signs and Symbols' tells the story of a man in an asylum who has gone crazy from thinking that everything in the world – the whisper of trees, etc. – is some deep and meaningful signal designed to communicate something to him. By drenching us with a tsunami of potentially symbolic happenings, Nabokov is perhaps prodding us into the sort of over-analysis of random events that drove the man in the story crazy. Pretty clever and impish, as you would expect from the writer of Lolita.

The final story, 'Lance', was the one I was most keen on reading as I wanted to see what Nabokov's opinions on a sci-fi 'nightmare' would be. It didn't really do what I expected, but I think those who see 'Lance' as Nabokov's 'rebuke' to science fiction are missing the point. Rather, he is lamenting that sci-fi so often becomes pulp stories about aliens and lasers and fantastical planets, and consequently that anything with the genre label of 'sci-fi' can be readily dismissed as cheap. So he writes a story which shows the conceptual and thematic potential of a story set in space: 'Lance' has a psychological, nightmarish root and Nabokov uses the black, disconnected setting to showcase this.

'Lance' is the hardest of the three stories to grasp, but you can do it if you flick through various lenses in your mind until you find the one that has no distortion. Nabokov is a writer whose prose the reader has to commit to, but this short collection is a worthwhile endeavour. ( )