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Title: Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY (CLOTH)) by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Brian Boyd ISBN: 0-375-40553-4 Publisher: Everyman's Library Pub. Date: 01 April, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.55 (31 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: N's powerful defense of liberty and preservation of home.
Comment: Nabokov's Speak, Memory is enjoyable and useful precisely because his experience of exile is so unique and so uniquely written. Time limits the autobiographer to dates, actual experiences and other rather black and white exegesis of life, but memory combined with the imagination fuses fiction to fact in way that compells the imaginative reader to explore his spatial-reality: what is a "colored spiral in a ball of glass" (275). This is both the way Nabokov apprehends (with emphasis on seeing) his life, and his philosophical-artistic vision towards literature-the dramatization of one's vision.
Nabokov limits himself to no such temporal and autobiographical constructs, and as such recreates and creatively illuminates his attitude towards a forgotten world, namely pre-Lenin Russia. Time, similar to Lenin, dictates his inability to return to his past utopian existance, the fantasy world of adolescent lust that the Russian Revolution crushed. Yes, we can read Speak, Memory as a subversion of totalitarianism, but it replaces the void usually created by such negitive-charged, albeit justified, criticism with the regenerating powers of the imagination.
With the intensity of spiritual euphoria, Nabokov embraces his liberating memory: "I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended wandering tonalities of the past" (170).
Nabokov's prose is at times opaque and tedious to the fact seeking critic, but good literature as well as poetry challenges the reader to imagine more than words and dates. While reading Speak, Memory one realizes that it is at once the telling of Nabokov's life story, his reverence for and commemoration of memory told with the subtle candor of an egocentric adolescent whose profound discourse eclipses our dull, time-regulated reality with his luminous, spatially expansive immagination.
This book is worth the time it takes to read it, because Nabokov reminds the reader what it is like to lose one's home. He does not, however, lament his loss to the point of self-pity. On the other hand, Nabokov claims the significance of the individual's experience over the group's, the particular over the general.
In the last years of a century which began and ends with war, Nabokov, a literary exile of the 20th century, finds hope in the irrational landscapes of the mind, the home of the spirit, the imagination.
Rating: 4
Summary: Beautiful, stunning, very, very irritating.
Comment: I have spent the summer drowning in Nabokovian puddles, but this autobiography is the least satisfactory yet. On the plus side it (naturally) contains some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. The seamless flow from concrete detail, scrupulous description, misty nostalgia to philosophical speculation is dizzying and inspired. The chapter on the author's mother is quite possibly the most gorgeous piece of writing in the language, but my favorite is the melancholy portrait of his uncle, a fascinating, loveable, moving character who might have enriched a novel. The battle between the natural and the human worlds are convincingly balanced, with history swooping in for final victory.
And yet Speak, Memory is fundamentally dislikeable. The tone grates: imagine a whole book written in the style of Nabokov's forewards - arrogant, didactic, humorless. That's what nearly kills it - the lack of Nabokovian playfulness. There are a couple of real-life events that are so shocking that they verge on farce, but in general the tone is reverent and uncritical, and the madness of Nabokov's greatest narrators has no place here.
The young Nabokov is thoroughly dislikeable (but then so is the Nab of the forewards), 'something of a bully' as he admits, but the episode with his brother was shameful, disgusting, and made me not want to read one of his books again. I'll get over that, but it's says something that one finds that monster Humbert more sympathetic than his creator. Of course, the narrator here isn't unadulterated Nab; he's as much a creation as any of his characters. He's just not a very interesting one, neither insane nor funny. As Michael Wood suggests, the absences in this very word-, idea-, people- and event-heavy book are some kind of a failure. What we're left with is literature's most stunning prose poem since Woolf's To The Lighthouse, with a big black hole in the centre.
Rating: 5
Summary: Nostalgia
Comment: As a young child Vladimir Nabokov had an aptitude for mathematics. The Nabokov household had about fifty servants. As an emigre family Vladimir and his brother were in Cambridge and his parents and sisters and another brother were in Berlin. His mother by 1930 occupied an apartment in Prague and received a small pension from the Czech government.
Nabokov's ancestors had numerous and diverse contacts with the world of letters. Nabokov says that his nostalgia is nostalgia for a lost childhood not lost banknotes. The kind of Russian family to which Nabokov belonged had a leaning toward English products, Pears soap, English toothpaste. Vladimir learned to read English before he learned to read Russian.
One is always at home in one's past. Vladimir found his own French governess and his mother's governess living in retirement in Lausanne, Switzerland. The women spoke to one another then, although in the past when they were in the same house they ignored one another.
He was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. The tutor started in 1906. When he was eleven his father decided that he should attend school. His father belonged to the great classless intelligentsia in Russia. In 1917-18 the family was put into a position of utter insecurity. His father became a minister of justice and the family was lodged near Yalta. In 1919 three Nabokov families fled Russia via the Crimea and Greece. From 1920 to 1940 Nabokov spent time preparing chess problems.
The book has pictures and an index. The publishing history of the book's parts appears in the forward. The book has charm. The fascination of the study of butterflies is treated by the author. Another subject covered is an extensive catalogue of both near and distant ancestors of the Nabokovs.
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Title: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov ISBN: 0679723420 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 23 April, 1989 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by VLADIMIR NABOKOV ISBN: 0679729976 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 09 December, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov ISBN: 0679723412 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 18 June, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Lolita by VLADIMIR NABOKOV ISBN: 0679723161 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 March, 1989 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov ISBN: 0679727256 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 07 May, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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