Customer Reviews

Speak, Memory (Everyman's Library)

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Speak, Memory is primarily concerned with Nabokov's life prior to his emigration to America in 1940. Unlike regular autobiographies it is not a traditional chronological sequence of dates and facts, but, rather, Nabokov's memory of certain events thematically linked to the creation of himself as an artist and as the person that he himself is, at present moment of time when he is writing the book. Basically, I think he must have asked himself the question - "Where did I come from and how did I become who I am?" as perhaps all of us have asked ourselves at some point in time and then set out to answer the question using the two rare tools he had at his disposal - memory and imagination. As he says somewhere in the book when he manages to link some event in the childhood to something that happened to him in later years - "The following of such thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography." This idea of defining the Self through a narrative, that is life, is the central aesthetic idea of the book. This also explains the structure of the book and for an autobiography, it's structure is quite complex. Perhaps that's why it is also called by critics the "most artistic of autobiographies". Nabokov starts off each chapter with a theme, generally with the help of some evocative image and pursues it through different phases of his life. And in this way he is able to delineate the various fragments of his personality and self in detail so that everything starts making sense as a whole.

Everything, of course, looks easy and effortless in Nabokov's hands. While reading the book, it seems, all the facts, images, feelings and evocations are concrete things stored at some place well known to the author and he simply picks them up as he pleases and serves them to the reader after dressing them up in his delicate prose. But of course it is not so easy. And anyone who has tried to remember and recreate his childhood and past time (as perhaps all of us have) and managed only hazy uncertainties will attest to it. I think that's why most of us, even those who are otherwise totally unsympathetic to Nabokov as a writer and person, will find in the book parallels to our own attempts to figure out where we came from and who we are. And for those of us who are cursed with defective or selective memories (or should I say blessed?) this book offers a poignant reminder of how much we have irretrievably lost and teaches us to see and notice things as if we are noticing own future recollection because that's the only way to regain all lost paradises (to use a Proustian phrase). I think the impulse to rediscover and reclaim childhood is deep in human nature and is present in all of us, and thus the chord "Speak, Memory" touches is truly universal and makes it a great book.

I honestly don't consider myself competent to judge whether Nabokov is one of the century's greatest writers. Like many of his contemporaries, much of his work is so obscure as to defy my comprehension, but I do very much like what I understand in Pale Fire and Lolita, both of which made the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the Century, and, of course, to read him is to be exposed to an English language and a prose style that one little knew existed. So I am more than willing to acknowledge that he was a singular and immense talent. It is altogether fitting then that his memoirs too should be unique.

For the most part, Nabokov's mission here is literally to let his memory speak. In so doing he recreates late czarist Russia in loving, painstaking detail. While to the best of my knowledge Nabokov was never particularly identified with the anti-Communist émigré movement, this book is its own kind of indictment of the USSR. The case it lays out is not the political or the economic one but the historical and cultural one. As he says:

My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:

...Beneath the sky Of my America to sigh For one locality in Russia.

The crimes of the commissars are without number and most are far greater than this, but this richly textured, impossibly specific and deeply moving memoir so brilliantly transports the reader to what seems to have been a wonderful and altogether innocent existence that to that list of crimes must be added the Bolsheviks utter destruction of this world. Even if you've never liked any of his other books, do yourself a favor and read this one. Even the passages that defy comprehension are beautiful.

GRADE: A

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.

It is known that the great author worked on this project for many years, collecting photographs, letters, scraps of unfinished poetry, searching his past in order to write a close to accurate account of his early life. In fact this autobiography is atypical, similar to a wandering mind, grasping at images, sights and smells, recollections, reminisces, rather than a chronological,'factual' version of a life lived.

The opening sentence of Speak, Memory, to my mind, is probably one of the most moving and haunting recollections in an autobiography ever read:

"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."

The narrator continues on to describe a young chronophobiac who experienced panic when he viewed an old home movie, seeing his mother wave from an upstairs window and below, a brand-new baby carriage standing alone, realizing that the carriage was his own days before his actual birth. This disturbed him as the feeling of peering at a world days before he came into existence, sort of a reverse course of events, was akin to staring directly into eternity.

Nabokov's childhood and adolescence was an enchanting one, part of an aristocratic family, a beautiful mother and a liberal-minded father who had a vast library, where little Vladimir would arrive home to find him practicing his fencing, the clanging of blades, with a colleague. This was a civilized existence in St. Petersburg before the onslaught of the Russian Revolution. Similar to most aristocratic families at the time, the Bolsheviks seized the family fortune, forcing the family to flee their beloved Russia to Germany. But when Nabokov looks back at this tumultuous period, he says,

"My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet Dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes."

The book is strewn with old black and white photographs of Nabokov's family. There is one particular photograph of his father and mother taken circa 1900 at their estate at Vrya, which really depicts the aristocratic demeanour and pure strength of the author's father. In the background are the birches and firs of the countryside where Nabokov discovered his life-long passion with butterfly collecting.

Even if the reader is not familiar with the great novels of Nabokov: Lolita, Pale Fire, The Eye and many others, will certainly enjoy this unique and brilliantly written autobiography by one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

I re-read SPEAK, MEMORY once a year or so; on every occasion I am left in awe of Nabokov's skill as a prose stylist, and am dazzled by the memories he re-creates here.

This is notable as the work of a writer of astounding technical skill and erudition, but also the work of someone who has a well-formed regard for his audience. At the very least, Nabokov expects that his audience will also be very intelligent.

Thus, what we are left with here is something far beyond a typical "self-portrait at 20," instead we are left with recollections reframed, recalled and rendered with an adamantine clarity that shimmers and dazzles - after reading the descriptions of a youth spent on a Russian estate one can smell the frost in the air, note the detail on the wings of the butterflies oft referenced, or almost see the long, northern latitude sunsets for yourself.

Technically formidable, engrossing and magical - this is one of very few books that I think everyone should read once.

-David Alston

Personally, I like everything Nabokov did if only because reading him makes me a better writer. He is a "master stylist" cut from the cloth of James Joyce (in terms of his innovation and talent) who challenges his audience at every turn. When devouring his fiction, I am sure that there are many things I miss due to my being no great genius of literary analysis, but time with Nabokov is invariably time well spent. I make a point of circling those lines and turns of phrase which are strikingly original in the hopes that my own skills improve via his brilliant examples. I do the same thing with vocabulary words which was particularly the case with Speak, Memory as I bracketed off those terms with which I am not familiar. Thus, it seems that studying Nabokov is an essential tutorial for the aspiring writer. This, his autobiography, is absolutely charming and easily accessible for those readers intimidated by his other works. The author describes his early life in Russia--and vicariously, life in Tsarist Russia in general--and provides us with a captivating history of his family. Unfortunately, I found that it ended too soon. I longed for another 200 pages so his development as a novelist could be more fully explored. Nabokov, like so many writers, appears to have been the quintessential introvert and his environmental struggles are quite compelling. This is an astounding work that should be consulted repeatedly.

"Speak Memory" is an autobiography, but it's an autobiography like none other. Although it does include factual information about the writer, it is mostly an account of how Nabokov has made sense of his life. His interpretation of his life has left him without bitterness or blame...or even disappointment at having lost everything as a young man when his world was turned upside down by the Russian revolution. Nabokov treats his own life as a work of art. The writing is so graceful it is soothing to read.

I first read this book in 1971 when I was an 18 year old college freshmen, and I loved it then. I was inspired to read it again after recently reading Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran." Although Nafisi claims to be a Nabokov scholar, she seems to have learned nothing from him. Like Nabokov, Nafisi was born into a privileged life which was turned upside down when her native country undergoes revolution. Nabokov tells us that his losses made it possible to have a richer, more meaningful life. Nafisi cannot stop whining about her losses, even though they are far less severe than Nabokov's. She is overwhelmed by self-pity and bitterness. She expresses contempt toward her less "sophisticated" countrymen and their vulnerablity to the appeal of the Ayatollah, but she fails to see the failures of her own economic and social class. I'd choose Nabokov over reading about Nabokov anyday.

This is one of the most beautifully written biographies I've ever read, though I can clearly see why it might not be for everyone. There are many passages throughout the book that read more like poetry than biography. His artistic sensibilities are present everywhere. The details he remembers are astounding but not unbelievable. Those blessed with photographic memories are able to capture so much that the rest of us miss. The beauty of Nabokov is that he doesn't just give us the memory in a few lines of straight history. He DRAWS the memory for you. He makes it come to life. He gives it color and movement. Absolutely gorgeous!

For those who are not fans of poetry and find long passages about colors and smells and sounds to be boring, this is definitely not the book for you. I'd mostly recommend it to artists and poets, or those who truly love Nabokov.

If you are a fan of Nabokov, you just have to read this. If you are not, this is as good a place to start as any. Anyway what is extra special about it is this: Everybody knows that Nabokov is a fabulous prosateur, a master magician with language. But here we have on display, along with the language, and he's never been better, a truly incredible memory. It's like he told his memory to speak, and it did. There is very little he can not remember, and talk about, in that fine, exquisite detail we expect. When you read Nabokov, you always experience this thing where he is writing about some kind of event you have known or seen yourself and he dazzles you with the way he gets it so exactly right and you know you cannot do this. So for this reason it is not a great surprise to discover, as we do here, that he has been logging all that stuff in his memory since he was a baby. A wonderful book!

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.