perfect harmony of intellect, senses and emotion

books:


	• Speak, Memory (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd Everyman's Library, 1999 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 45 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Superlative autobiography

I avoid reading autobiographies because so many authors fall on their faces when describing the defining qualities of their lives, in a manner that is interesting to an outsider. Nabokov is an exception: Everything he wrote about felt seemed so close and warm in the memory. He captured both the quintessence of the innocence of youth and the trials of growing up in a turbulent nation. This is one of the only books that I ever read where I was not sated in the end: Just a few more Nabokovian pages of literary richness, please.

As an aside, I loved his description of the "salvo" a chair would make when his zaftig governess (or was it his tutor?) sat down. It forever changed the way I perceive people, myself included, when they sit down. But anyway.

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The Place of Consciousness

Reading this literary whirlwind is somewhat of a harsh inside joke, one that I happen to get and enjoy. He follows some of his motifs and images that he uses in his other novels (the window pencil, cyclical time, etcetera) to make the reader realize that by reading this memoir, the reader has come to know Nabokov less on page 310 than before on page 1! You have to find Nabokov in this book, and those who complain about tediousness and fortress enigmas--those should sigh and let Nabokov set and collect dust on their bookshelf.

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A Display Case of Butterflies

I read "Speak Memory" over a series of sun-shiny days, sitting in my back yard garden with twenty-six species of flowers blooming around me, in a neighborhood of Victorian houses with 100-year old back yard gardens. My flowers include mallows, zinnias, beebalm, cosmos, snapdragons, and other nectar producers. Over the whole week, I saw just one butterfly, a simple Cabbage White.

I don't think Vladimir Nabokov would write so approvingly of America today as he did of America in the 40s and 50s. I think he'd be disappointed. He'd find it barren and ugly, a casualty of the artless modernism he raged against all his life. Nabokov was a fervid conservative in most things, a man committed to his own memories of a more gracious past, his own childhood in pre-Bolshevik Russia. But don't get the idea that Nabokov was the ultra-capitalist curmudgeonly ranting style of conservative that one hears all too often today; here's what he wrote about that sort of conservative, who "rallied close to my side but did so from such crude reactionary motivation that I was only embarrassed by their despicable support. Indeed, I pride myself with having discerned even then the symptoms of waht is so clear today, when a kind of family circle has gradually formed, linking representatives of all nations, jolly empire builders in the jungle clearings, french policemen, the unmentionable German product, the good old churchgoinf Russian or Polish Pogromshchik, the lean American lyncher, the man with bad teeth who squirts antiminority stories in the bar or the lavatory..."

Like almost everything Nabokov wrote, these memoirs pivot around the Bolshekiv Revolution. Talking about the spiral as a clearer signifier than the circle, he explicitly describes his own life as consisting of a first curl of the spiral, his childhood, ending with his family's flight from the Revolution; a second curl, his twenty years as an emigre in Europe, a grim and self-enclosed time; and his later life in America, a relaxed time of blooming friendships.

More than half the book recaptures the fluttering beauties of his highly privileged and cultured childhood. These chapters are essentially just like the childhood chapters of any memoirist who had a happy youth; they depict his growing self-discovery, his awareness of life in its larval and pupal stages, his acquisition of a sense of having a life cycle to fulfill. "All of this is as it should be according to the theory of recapitulation; the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time," he meditates, and in another passage, speaking of coincidences and chance encounters, he declares; "The following of such thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography." But what distinguishes Nabokov's clearly nostalgic memoirs from those of other writers is the splendor of his language. The moths and butterflies in his display cases are so beautiful and rare that the reader scarcely dares breathe on them. One can read Nabokov's tales of his Tsarist playland for simple verbal pleasure, without much bothering over their significance or reality.

Alas, I find the reality dubious. Tsarist Russia was not that cultured, that gradually progressive, that tolerant and susceptible to self-regeneration. Vlady is mythologizing, friends, painting his lost childhood idyll with acrylics in primary colors! There WERE serfs. There were pogroms, racial barriers and supressions of customs, grinding poverty, and rural neglect tempered only with exploitation. The Bolsheviks were thugs, yes indeed, but they couldn't have triumphed without the mastication of the masses by the upper classes.

The shorter and less lovely chapters of Speak Memory that retell Nabokov's years as an emigre also reveal a kind of display case glass between the author and reality: "As I look back at those years of exile, I see myself, and thousands of other Russians, leading an odd but by no means unpleasant existence, in material indigence and intellectual luxury, among perfectly unimportant strangers, spectral Germans and Frenchmen in whose more or less illusory cities we, emigres, happened to dwell. ...no real communication, of the rich human sort so widespread in our own midst, existed between us and them." Well, well! Having been an emigre myself, on both sides of the Atlantic, I can certainly recognize this state of things. Old Vlad is certainly being honest and implicitly self-derogatory. Once again, however, he mythologizes: following the Bolshevik calamity, he says "With very few exceptions, all liberal-minded creative forces -- poets, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and so on -- had left Lenin's and Satlin's Russia. Those who had not were either withering away there or adulterating their gifts by complying with the political demands of the state." Thereafter he continues through a full chapter discussing the works of his fellow emigres, all but his own justly forgotten or repudiated by now, while however tenuously and in whatever peril, the writers and composers who stood their ground under Lenin, Stalin, and their troll-hearted successors -- Shostakovich, Prokofieff, Schnittke, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, Vosnezhensky, Ahkmatova, Solzhentitsyn, and others -- have bequeathed post-communist Russia a heritage of masterpieces.

What saved Nabokov, I think, was his passage from the pupa stage of an emigre to the winged maturity of being an immigrant. That metamorphosis is not recounted in Speak Memory, which ends cleanly in 1939 with the Nabokov family's departure for America.

Such beautiful language! Such wit! Nabokov is a show-off, no doubt, an exotic hand-sized tropical moth of a writer, the only author whose books ever send me to a dictionary. Hey, that's what I enjoy about him.

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Memory Well Spoken

3 starts for "I liked it" --

Thought not the best of the stories I've read (literary-autobiography-wise, nothing I've read surpasses Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles), this charming, rather haphazardly collated collection of Nabokov's autobiographical episodes is certainly worth reading for its breathtaking prose, unique and incisive ruminations on various subjects, and revealing, behind-the-scenes vignettes and thoughts of one of the most fascinating writers of the 20th century.

The only major misgiving I had was the bland, woolgathering reveries I had to trudge through. But then there are these passages that soar into the Unreal and leave me gasping for breath. From the very first sentence ( "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness"), Nabokov proves himself again and again to be the master prose stylist that he was. Just read this description of the moon:

So there it comes, steering out of a flock of small dappled clouds, which it tinges with a vague iridescence; and, as it sails higher, it glazes the runner tracks left on the road, where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen shadow (p.99).

In these instances, I simply must surrender, prostrate, to Nabokov with my humble hat off. I was also pleasantly surprised to find myself laughing over some of the vignettes (esp. in Chapter 6). Take, for example, this one:

One summer afternoon, in 1911, Mademoiselle [my favorite along with Nabokov's father] came into my room, book in hand, started to say she wanted to show me how wittily Rousseau denounced zoology (in favor of botany), and by then was too far gone in the gravitational process of lowering her bulk into an armchair to be stopped by my howl of anguish: on that seat I had happened to leave a glass-lidded cabinet tray with long, lovely series of the Large White. Her first reaction was one of stung vanity: her weight, surely, could not be accused of damaging what in fact it had demolished; her second was to console me: Allons donc, ce ne sont que des papillons de potager! - which only made matters worse. (127)

Funny, incisive, and lyrical, the book is a great read especially if you're a writer. Like some reviewer has written, "time with Nabokov is invariably time well spent." And it is true. He shows us the secret passageways and hidden nooks of the English language that other writers have completely overlooked. Although the book lacks unity and there are episodes I couldn't care less about, it is simply delightful to follow his prose, stumble over obscure charming words, and be surprised, accompanied by that guttural groan of awe and satisfaction at witnessing the magician of words at work.

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perfect harmony of intellect, senses and emotion

This book is an invitation to a dreamy journey into a place where words become colorfully alive, and silence and nature bring ectasy. Such vivid images! It reads so natural and fluid, but always perfectly controlled and unpretentiously beautiful. Please read this book.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

From one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory was first published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised and republished in 1966. The Everyman's Library edition includes, for the first time, the previously unpublished "Chapter 16"?the most significant unpublished piece of writing by the master, newly released by the Nabokov estate?which provided an extraordinary insight into Speak, Memory.

Nabokov's memoir is a moving account of a loving, civilized family, of adolescent awakenings, flight from Bolshevik terror, education in England, and émigré life in Paris and Berlin. The Nabokovs were eccentric, liberal aristocrats, who lived a life immersed in politics and literature on splendid country estates until their world was swept away by the Russian revolution when the author was eighteen years old. Speak, Memory vividly evokes a vanished past in the inimitable prose of Nabokov at his best.

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