A Thoughtful Consideration of an Iconic Memoir

Our upcoming Bookmarked title, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory by Sven Birkerts, received a nice review in Kirkus

Nabokov’s memoir inspires a literary critic in this latest entry in the publisher’s Bookmarked series.

Essayist, editor, and memoirist Birkerts, preoccupied by thoughts of “time, memory, patterns,” was drawn to Speak, Memory, the Russian author’s finely crafted rendering of his past. In a sensitive, sympathetic examination of the memoir, Birkerts focuses both on Nabokov’s revelations about his life and, in close detail, on his craft: how “he worked his strategies from page to page.” As a memoirist himself, Birkerts looks to Nabokov as exemplar: How does one write a memoir? What unconscious forces shape it? He admires Nabokov’s ability to convey details about his childhood while maintaining authorial distance: “the naive before presented through the filter of the sophisticated after.” Birkerts had been unpleasantly surprised by the response of many people he portrayed in his own memoir; some felt miscast and others slighted because they played only a small part. Nabokov, he notes, “chose to honor the essential privacy of his immediate family” while at the same time making his narrative seem intimate, choosing even to include family photos. Besides seeing Nabokov as his “guide and inspiration,” Birkerts feels an affinity for his experience of exile, nostalgia, and cultural dislocation. The son of Latvian immigrants, Birkerts, too, grew up feeling “an inner split,” which generated in him an abiding penchant “for contemplating the past.” He charts his responses to rereading the book at several different times in his life as well as his growing admiration for “the lyricism, the unwinding brilliance of the sentences.” He closely examines the “sardonic, playful, melancholic, fanatically precise” quality of the author’s voice on the page. Along with discoursing on themes of “eternity and infinity,” Birkerts closes by reflecting on “the sweeping cultural transition” from analog to digital that he has long decried, reflections that set his response to Nabokov in context.A thoughtful consideration of an iconic memoir.