Name: Speak, Memory
Rating: 4.333333333333333 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780307787736

Vladimir Nabokov

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Defense.

An Autobiography Revisited

Speak, Memory

'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography, which is itself a work of art. Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.

Amazing autobiography. Nabokov is an amazing writer and I absolutely love the sentences that he crafts in this book. There are certain chapters that you wonder why you should care (e.g., about his coat-of-arms). But this is one of my favorite works by Nabokov. 

Here is just one example, speaking of his father being thrown up in the air: "Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin." We go form a moment of fondness to death. 

Nabokov challenges the "traditional" autobiography by writing more about the important people in his life, which is really where our life story is.

Kevin Juneos Mei Le

Amazing autobiography. Nabokov is an amazing writer and I absolutely love the sentences that he crafts in this book. There are certain chapters that you wonder why you should care (e.g., about his coat-of-arms). But this is one of my favorite works by Nabokov. 

Here is just one example, speaking of his father being thrown up in the air: "Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin." We go form a moment of fondness to death. 

Nabokov challenges the "traditional" autobiography by writing more about the important people in his life, which is really where our life story is.

Speak, Memory An Autobiography Revisited

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