Wonderful recollections, especially the joys of hunting butterflies

Brilliant. My all-time favorite--tied with Cather in the Rye. ( )

Beautiful

I started reading it, because I read a fragment of it in an anthology and loved it. In the end though, it was very slow. Some fragments and insights are absolutely beautiful and brilliant, while other parts rather unengaging. The style is also very similar to the style of other writers born in that part of Europe. Many of the ones who come to my mind were, or are, Polish from the territories that now constitute separate countries of Ukraine, Lithuania or Latvia. Especially writers like Iwaszkiewicz, Milosz, and Konwicki share the same convention of lyrical, introspective and philosophizing prose. There are fragments in this memoir, though, I know I will be coming back to again and again. ( )

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

Even the name of this wonderfully lyrical autobiography is commanding. Speak! And speak it does. Of love, of loss, of finding a new life and being able to leap to safety to embrace it. But......Love....more than anything is what Vladimir Nabokov's partial autobiography resonates with. His enduring and all encompassing love for his family. The living and the dead.

It only covers 37 of his 77 years, but what a 37 years it was! St. Petersburg to Cambridge, Berlin and Paris to America. The book ends with his sighting of the ship that will carry Nabokov and his little family to America and safety. The safety that so many were not able for so many terrible reasons to find themselves, including members of his own family.

Nabokov does not give a blow-by-blow account of his life, but in vignettes that 'speak' of his life, and his family's life. He tells the story of his courageous father and the battles for a democratically styled Russia, the powerful personality of his beloved mother, his tragic brother....all is exposed, yet not. The story of his life with Véra, his other self, is given, but not displayed. The love he feels for his little son Dimitri is almost beyond words. All of this is served for the readers enjoyment.

So why are you still here? Arn't you supposed to be on the way to the book store? This is a purchase that will not be regretted. I promise.