Speak Memory
by Vladimir Nabokov(1951)
Novelc. 280 pages
“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.”
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One great work, every day
by Vladimir Nabokov(1951)
“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.”
Vladimir Nabokov(1951)
Nabokov's autobiography is really a meditation on consciousness and the cruelty of time. He reconstructs his aristocratic Russian childhood with such hallucinatory precision that you can smell the leather of the family carriage, see the exact pattern of sunlight through nursery curtains. Each chapter is a small miracle of prose, sentences that seem to hover between languages, between memory and invention. Written in exile, knowing everything he describes has been annihilated by revolution and war, the book achieves something like resurrection through pure attention.