Vladimir Nabokov was the Niles Crane of 20th-century literature: snooty, fastidious, and comically inept at being a normal guy. (And it’s part of his fastidiousness that he would have despised my handy, pop-culture analogy). Even his ailments had something snobbish about them. I mean, synesthesia? Who has that? And what kind of douche decides that sleep is too plebeian? Would it have been so hard to come down with herpes and depression like everyone else?

Needless to say, Speak, Memory is one of More...

This is, in my opinion, Nabokov's best work. The autobiography as a form suits Nabokov perfectly, as his novels are never so much about plot or 'big ideas,' just the intense poetic possibilities of language itself. So be forewarned, there is almost no useful information here. You may learn a thing or two about pre-Revolution Russia, a scrap of detail about his encounters with Joyce in Paris, or some tidbits about butterfly hunting, but really there's nothing to be learned, no story, no clues to More...

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist.

Please disregard the three stars above. There is no dark lined s More...

The embedding of minute details from a world forever gone into the plush, exuberant prose of Nabokov is the closest you will come to literature practiced as jewellery, horology or some combination of the two.

Apart from the stuff I mentioned in the reading updates I'd like to bring to the fore, from amongst the embarrassment of riches that is Speak, Memory, the following:

In speaking about his love for composing "fairy chess" moves, which he describes as a poethico-mathematical endeavor, Nabokov More...

Disgusting that a somebody could be such an amazing writer. (And this is a person born in Russia, writing in English!) The word "genius" seems to come up a lot when people speak of Nabokov. Having read this, I now understand.

It took me some time to become used to the way he writes. Nabokov often does not seem to care if his point is immediately clear to the reader. Some of the gems I found in this book I could just as easily have missed in a quicker read. So close attention is rewarded. Also rec More...

I just prefer his fiction. I understand that this is one of the most important autobiographies/memoirs ever written, but I fail to see why. I admit that Nabokov's "poetic prose" really shines through, at certain times; however, on the whole, I found the narrative voice to be frustrating, pompous, and oppressive.

Wow! This is one of the best memoirs I've ever read! Prior to this, top in my list were Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and Harry Bernstein's The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers.

Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory neither has that sorry circumstance of being a born in dirt-poor Irish family nor being a witness to a tragic love story between two people of different religions. Rather, the young Nabokov was the eldest child of a rich political couple residing on a big house (with lots More...

This is one of the few instances where I wish I could give half stars. It really is between 3 and 4 for me, but I'm rounding up for reasons I don't even understand.

This is Nabokov's autobiography (as the parenthetical states), where he recounts important moments, places, and persons from the first half of his life, mainly focusing on childhood. He begins the book as a privileged boy, living in a mansion, having multiple servants and tutors, without any wants; and ends the book an exiled man bou More...

Best autobiography ever. Excluding Davey Johnson's "Bats," and Keith Hernandez's "If At First...," of course, because the 1985 National League East pennant race was far more interesting than Nabokov's life. Although, I have to say, for introspection and overall quality of writing, Nabokov has those other two beat.

I finished reading Nabokov's Speak, Memory on Feb 17, during our stay with T and D in Kingston. It is a beautifully written memoir, full of tender things in it. Tender because irretrievably lost. Chapter Five, to my mind, is the best thing in it. It's about Nabokov's French governess, Mademoiselle. Having moved from Switzerland to Russia, she was not only geographically but culturally displaced. After she returned to her own country, she would speak of her time in Russia as her best years. The c More...

Absolutely enchanting. After 'Lolita,' of course, this is where you look see what Nabokov could do with English prose.

I could not have asked for a better reading experience.

Read the first sentence and you will see why this is perhaps the most extraordinary, poetic and heartfelt memoir ever written. High praise, yes. Here's the 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." I think I may have encountered this book some time in the 80s or 90s, but I have returned to it again and again for its wisdom, the beauty of its prose, the structure of the narrativ More...

Not too many things to say about Nabokov’s memories. It’s just that you discover the writer behind his work (so far Lolita, in my case), daydreaming and wishing you were one of his playmates in that idyllic Russian countryside or my old love, Sankt Petersburg. His incursions into the past, Mnemosina, as he calls his memories, reveal, as I suppose everyone expects, an avid reader or (surprise?) a passionate entomologist, a young man spending his nights solving or creating chess problems or skippi More...

A gift of a book, a beautiful memoir.

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter - to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable More...

I don't think I was quite in the mood for this. Obviously it's incredibly well-written. I mean, if I was the end result of the breeding of tens of generations of Russian intellectual nobility, I'd probably be a smarty pants too. Sorry, smarty écouter. Still, while I enjoyed the gauzy nostalgia of his childhood, I felt like there was a lot of interesting story I was missing, replaced for some reason by extensive descriptions of butterfly collecting. Sure, it's still Nabokov writing about butterfl More...

An wormhole of synthestesia and nostalgia. Absolutely strange but organically beautiful. It's like a letter written home to Memory as a mother. I don't think there any other memoir is structured quite like this one.

""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. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some fort More...

Some of the finest memory writing out there, especially the scenes of his mother bent over her cards, and riding in Petersburg buggies before the war. For the writer of Lolita, it is surprisingly tame--no Augusten Burroughs type confessions here. However the richness of his memories, how he captures every small detail, smells, touch, quality of light, the book on the table, the flower in season--it evokes such deep and abiding scenes that you almost feel they were your own memories. I admit, I c More...

Although some may argue that Nabokov in his autobiography is a little haughty, no one can argue that this man had an incredibly rich and interesting life. I really enjoyed this piece because it seemed almost to be fiction, not only with the incredible events in history that shaped his life, but also from Nabokov's removed voice and opulent prose. Some in my class critiqued him for this opulence, that he thought more of himself that he ought though I find it even more true to his character - Nabo More...

Autobiographies can be something of a wasted opportunity. Often an author given a unique enough life to warrant a biography wastes his singular perspective on it by recounting the various peaks and valleys of his life the same way a biographer would. So much emphasis is placed on the objective facts, on creating a conventional narrative. But objective facts are a matter of public record, and really, anyone could write such a biography and guess how Nabokov felt when he was exiled from Russia. He More...

In Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov fondles the minute sensory and surface details of what he loved as a boy (especially butterflies, on which he became a renowned expert) while skimming over the particulars of major events, such as the exile from Russia of his liberal, reformist family. The memoir embodies the writer’s conviction that “this world is not as bad as it seems.”

Published first as a series of essays over many years in The New Yorker, and compiled as a book in 1947 after “more or less More...

Nabokov fascinates me. Before reading this book I was under the impression that his brain worked differently than mine and perhaps differently than most peoples. My impression was that he was a genius, not for his literary works, but rather his literary works were a result of his being a genius. Reading this book ensures me that my impression is correct.

Nabokov describes sounds as having colors to him. Nabokov says he hears voices regularly but they mostly say the most benign things. Nabokov in More...

I actually do think this book was amazing, but amazing is not necessarily enough to be totally enamored. Nabokov is the ultimate people's intellectual, hovering only just within reach of those who consider themselves a little better than the hoi polloi: keeping himself there by threatening at any moment to go beyond - and at moments even going beyond, and taking a breather, with a Gauloise, from the stench of the commonality in his ivory tower. His overweening snobbishness whisks him to fantasyl More...

Oh, the snobbest of the snobs.
How do you read a book about "privilege", when it comes in the form of a male author (privilege enough), then of an uber-upper pre-Revolution Russian rich, then as a famous writer writing about his own past?
Well, it irked me a lot in the beginning. Nabokov hated sleep because it was too egalitarian, in his view... but then, moving beyond one's own personal counter-snobism, I can't say I was not mesmerized by some of his sentences, and moved by some of his paragrap More...

The thing that got me to read this book, which Nabokov originally published as individual short stories – purportedly fiction – then collected into a book which he termed an autobiography, was the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. Orhan Pamuk selected and read the chapter about Nabokov’s father’s duel.

I read Pamuk’s The New Life, after I accepted a job in Turkey, but before I moved there and I liked the book. I think this was more out of excitement for the county than for his novel. Though I did go t More...

A great writer, a phenomenally interesting life, and a unique autobiography.

It's good enough to be fiction (though some of it kind of is, as parts are written in the third person with Nabokov meeting a pseudonymed version of himself) and Nabokov even plays with the typical chronological outline of an autobiography (each chapter is a natural progression, but within the chapters he moves ably around in time).

Nabokov remains an unparalleled writer of the english language and this autobiography incl More...

I wish I had written a review when I had put this thing down, a book that made me want to be a writer, that totally blew open my understanding of literature and its relationship to life - especially in this case the distinction between memoir and fiction (which in many ways mirrors the relationship between life & art). I wrote an email to my friend Ben the day I wrote it. Some excerpts, if you're interested.

"....Suddenly, Nabokov's guarded individuality, his fierce defense of his poetic disp More...

This exquisitely written memoir evokes life before and after the Bolshevik revolution, and how the author, as a youth, coped with violent change not just of government, but of paradigm, and above all of character. He is aware even as a child that many of the people he knew were caught in amber--people of their time, unwilling or unable to cope with change.

Nabokov here, as elsewhere, exhibits the art of characterization; I regard Nabokov to be Henry James' superior, for all the latter's ability t More...

He has an absolutely amazing vocabulary which he uses totally un-pretentiously and beautifully. I loved the way that he took forever to tell stories and never really got around to saying anything, and his dry sense of humour was great, as in the game of reminiscences about the writer that he played with his friend, and his descriptions of his tutors. It was really touching the way he adresses his wife in the writing (although without really giving any information about her).

Speak, Mnemosyne!

Probably one of my favorite autobiographies to date (beaten only perhaps by the Education of Henry Adams). Realistically, it is 4.56 stars given the narrative gaps (most were written as individual pieces for Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and Harpers). The section on butterflies (Chapter 6), his Russian education (Chapter 9), and his portrait of his mother (Chapter 2) were absolutely AMAZING. Other chapters were just as good, and only a couple were less than what I hoped. It More...