Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor

In his introduction, VN biographer and major fanboy Boyd insists that what’s here isn’t “scraping the barrel.” This despite VN’s own insistence many years earlier that there wasn’t anything left worth publishing. As they say, your mileage may vary, but unless you’re an academic studying the minutiae, you may be rather bored. Certainly the first half of the volume might test your patience, and I would recommend skimming the essays for subjects that interest you.

The second half is almost all interview excerpts, and the repetition of questions is taxing. A lot of this ground has been covered elsewhere, especially if you have read Speak Memory, Strong Opinions, Selected Letters, and the Boyd biography. Nonetheless, there are show more utterances of interest. For instance, about Laughter in the Dark he says, “It’s not particularly good. It’s a little crude.” That was in 1951, and elsewhere in the book, in 1937, he merely tells the interviewer of the writing process, careful not to damage sales. (I tend to agree with his analysis and not the current 4.1 rating of LITD on this site. If you were to believe the ratings here, you would opt for LITD over Lolita. Big mistake. And I would advise first reading The Gift and Invitation to a Beheading before the other Russian novels; those were VN’s personal favorites for a good reason.) show less

This is a miscellany of essays, reviews, interviews and letters by Vladimir Nabokov arranged chronologically. He always asked for interview questions ahead of time and wrote out the answers -- so don't expect any spontaneous, off-the-cuff remarks. I found the book reviews the most interesting because he gives such wonderful examples of what he finds reprehensible in a given work--often Soviet works that no one has ever heard of. Makes me curious about the authors he does find worth reading. I'd recommend this book for those interested in Nabokov's thoughts on writing and writers, and what he thought his best work is.