"Speak Memory" is perhaps not the most faithful autobiography that I read, but this is by far the most beautiful. Obviously, the author of "Lolita" plays with the conventions, and we should expect anything but a classic, short, what we hoped would normally find in a tale of memories.
Nabokov depicts in vivid detail his youth, since the circumstances of his birth until the construction of his adult life with his wife and son. Through this flood of memories, the purpose of Vlad, whose writing is always so conducive to melancholy, is to establish the genesis that led him to become a writer.
The importance of childhood is omnipresent. If you had, like me, the emotional shock required reading "Ada or Ardor", you will understand that the childhood of Vlad falls Ardis, a Russian fantasy, idyllic outskirts of St Petersburg . And Nabokov, like Van, Ada and Lucette, is one of those wonderful children born under the sign of the Don. We then find moments of grace buried under the combination of fluid and clever metaphors: the little Vlad discovering that combines the words for colors, the delicacy little girl who characterized her mother (beautiful when she feigned admiration when the children open their Christmas gifts), the author's growing passion for butterflies, his first love in Biarritz ...
In Nabokov, everything is change, desire, and figures of speech are distinguished by the remarkable tone is casual and eloquent. Everything is sublimated, and although it is sometimes difficult to follow the wanderings of the author confines of her memory, I loved the ironic or difficult it is on his family: father about to fight Pushkin in a duel with the many tutors sailing between three languages (English, Russian, French) ...
What is especially admirable is how the work is extended to the Children in the second half, rushing the reader to the lives of immigrants after the March Revolution and s to complete such a sketch on the studies of Nabokov and his family life. A bit like in "Ada", in fact, childhood is timeless, this Anti-Terra, which is none other than our perceived world through feelings and dreams.
The book, dedicated to his muse and wife Vera, looks like a present in which the author indulges. I especially appreciate the tone confidential it adopts in this work in which he addresses the second person singular, not created for the player but for his dear and loving herself.
As usual, he plays hide and seek with the reader, and this one really never knows distinguish fact from fiction but maybe deep down, that is, the actual mechanism of memory and the re-creation of memories ...
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