Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Greatest Autobiography of Twentieth Century, July 19, 2005
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.
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36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
if you read no other Nabokov, October 21, 2000
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
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33 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, stunning, very, very irritating., September 1, 1999
By A Customer
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.
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