Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

'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. 

I received the Everyman's Library edition of this book for Christmas, and started it at the beginning of January. It was an interesting way to approach Nabokov's work, but I think reading his autobiography is a good primer to reading his other stories, like Lolita. He mentions many times how he has written certain experiences and memories of his own into his other novels.

Speak, Memory was written incredibly beautifully, with some ideas and lines that just begged to be highlighted. However, it was a bit dense, which is why it took me so long to get through. The first chapter, speaking about his memory of being a person, an entity separate from others, was a vivid and thought-provoking lead-in to the book, but I have to say after that there were some parts I was quite bored with. There was a whole chapter just listing the names and connections between his ancestors, which I forced myself to read more as a test of will than anything else. From Nabokov I got the sense that he knew he was a very good writer, and he knew that he had a privileged background, and so had no shame in self-indulging quite a bit in his autobiography. I mean, autobiographies by definition are somewhat self-indulgent, but at certain points in this I literally had to keep myself from asking aloud, "WHO CARES??". The middle chapters of the book are sort of a dull blur in my memory, but I think the last chapter served as a bit of redemption- in it I found the sentiment and thought-based writing I had been craving for the last hundred or so pages. In my opinion, Nabokov fixated far too much on his childhood. At a certain point I just wanted his story to move along. The one thing that really stood out for me about his writing, however, was his descriptions of light. The way Nabokov described light in his story, from the lurid gleam after a rainstorm to the view of a small town from a passing train in the night, it was like he was taking the images right out of his mind and putting them into mine. 

Although I was sometimes bored with it, and for a memoir found it to be a little too impersonal, I can understand why Speak, Memory is considered one of the best autobiographies of the twentieth century. The experience of growing up as a privileged child in Russia and then being exiled makes quite an interesting story, and some of Nabokov's views really struck me, especially about what life is. (A bright gap between two infinities of darkness, a spiral in a glass ball). To read any of Nabokov's work, I think it would be pretty important to read his autobiography, because his life strongly affected his writing, as with most authors.