Entry tags:
Butterflies and books
So, for my Classics books club, I admit I somewhat rushed my way through Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory. As the book club meeting was tonight and I picked it up only last Sunday, I was afraid I wouldn’t finish it on time. Luckily, it’s a relatively short book, only 300 pages (which I suppose is not particularly short; it’s just not particularly long either), and it was much quicker reading than a lot of the other classics we’ve read (I was afraid it would be as dense as Proust, but it’s really, really not).
Speak, Memory mostly covers the earlier parts of Nabokov’s life, up through his time at Trinity College in Cambridge, although it tends to jump around a lot chronologically, and the last chapter is mostly about his son. Nabokov talks a lot about memory itself, the way it works and doesn’t work, the things he remembers and misremembers and forgets, and the way in which he tends to lose his grip on his memories of things when he uses them in his novels—the memory becomes one of his characters’ memories rather than his own. It’s all very self-aware and thought-provoking, and you can see why this is the guy who’s famous for writing with unreliable narrators.
While Nabokov paints poignant and frequently comic sketches about a whole bunch of aspects of his childhood, including portraits of all this tutors and governesses, and the houses where he lived, and his ancestors and family members, the bits I liked best involved his hobbies of catching butterflies and writing poetry. The butterfly stuff I liked largely because it was fabulously written, and it provides a common thread that is worked into many of the subsequent stories, and because the portrayal of young Vladimir with this awesome scientific hobby that none of the adults understand and who are all various flavors of patronizing about it is just really sad.
The poetry bits I liked because they are HOLY GOD SO SPOT ON about the trials and tribulations of writing shitty adolescent poetry. He writes about falling into using disorganized clichés instead of the images in one’s own head because of certain words rhyming, and about how derivative one can be even when one works really hard on every line, and about how pretty much everyone but his mom completely savaged his poetry. I laughed at loud when he said he wrote a poem about “a mistress I had never lost, never loved, and never met, but whom I was entirely prepared to meet, love, and lose”—which I think is derivative adolescent poetry in a nutshell, really.
I admit to rather liking the bits where he complains about how his classmates at Cambridge, while usually very well-educated, liberal, and sensible men, were all complete idiots about Russia, and seemed to have no interest in rectifying their ignorance, and how this drove college-aged Nabokov entirely up a wall. Nabokov, as a character, seems to be a rather judgy and asocial dude, but this is okay, as we are reading a memoir, not hanging out with him at a party, and he’s really quite funny when complaining about people.
I’m afraid I’m rather talked out about this book as I just had a two-hour discussion on it, but I will leave you with one observation: After the text of the book ends, my edition has a one-page “About the Author” section. Does anyone else think this seems a bit stupid? I just read 300 pages about the author. The only information in the About the Author section not covered in the preceding 300 pages is his death, which could quite easily be presented as a single line at the end of the books saying “Vladimir Nabokov died in (place) on (date) of (cause).”
Speak, Memory mostly covers the earlier parts of Nabokov’s life, up through his time at Trinity College in Cambridge, although it tends to jump around a lot chronologically, and the last chapter is mostly about his son. Nabokov talks a lot about memory itself, the way it works and doesn’t work, the things he remembers and misremembers and forgets, and the way in which he tends to lose his grip on his memories of things when he uses them in his novels—the memory becomes one of his characters’ memories rather than his own. It’s all very self-aware and thought-provoking, and you can see why this is the guy who’s famous for writing with unreliable narrators.
While Nabokov paints poignant and frequently comic sketches about a whole bunch of aspects of his childhood, including portraits of all this tutors and governesses, and the houses where he lived, and his ancestors and family members, the bits I liked best involved his hobbies of catching butterflies and writing poetry. The butterfly stuff I liked largely because it was fabulously written, and it provides a common thread that is worked into many of the subsequent stories, and because the portrayal of young Vladimir with this awesome scientific hobby that none of the adults understand and who are all various flavors of patronizing about it is just really sad.
The poetry bits I liked because they are HOLY GOD SO SPOT ON about the trials and tribulations of writing shitty adolescent poetry. He writes about falling into using disorganized clichés instead of the images in one’s own head because of certain words rhyming, and about how derivative one can be even when one works really hard on every line, and about how pretty much everyone but his mom completely savaged his poetry. I laughed at loud when he said he wrote a poem about “a mistress I had never lost, never loved, and never met, but whom I was entirely prepared to meet, love, and lose”—which I think is derivative adolescent poetry in a nutshell, really.
I admit to rather liking the bits where he complains about how his classmates at Cambridge, while usually very well-educated, liberal, and sensible men, were all complete idiots about Russia, and seemed to have no interest in rectifying their ignorance, and how this drove college-aged Nabokov entirely up a wall. Nabokov, as a character, seems to be a rather judgy and asocial dude, but this is okay, as we are reading a memoir, not hanging out with him at a party, and he’s really quite funny when complaining about people.
I’m afraid I’m rather talked out about this book as I just had a two-hour discussion on it, but I will leave you with one observation: After the text of the book ends, my edition has a one-page “About the Author” section. Does anyone else think this seems a bit stupid? I just read 300 pages about the author. The only information in the About the Author section not covered in the preceding 300 pages is his death, which could quite easily be presented as a single line at the end of the books saying “Vladimir Nabokov died in (place) on (date) of (cause).”