Why Nabokov? Why Speak, Memory

Below is a little snippet, a little taste, a drink before dinner, of Sven Birkerts upcoming Bookmarked volume on Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory

I was having lunch last summer in a seafood restaurant in Newport, Rhode Island when I unexpectedly got the itch. I had just taken part in a panel discussion about literary magazines and editing, and my co-panelists and I were eating oysters and calamari and making post-talk small talk about our projects. At one point, the woman who was hosting us mentioned that she was at work on a book-length project about a book that had been influential in her life. There was a publisher, she said, dedicated to select one-book explorations that combined the personal and the literary.

I don’t perk up easily, but now I did. Reading books has been the main through-line in my life. I spent many years as a bookseller and book dealer before I tried my hand at reviewing. After some years of that, I started writing longer and more reflective essays on authors and books. Then, still more years later, I published a short book called Reading Life: Books for the Ages, in which each essay recounted my reading experience with a different novel. I had so many favorites to choose from. I ended writing about just a few, like The Moviegoer, To the Lighthouse, The Ambassadors, and Lolita. Each novel had marked my life in some special way. I very much enjoyed approaching these novels from a more personal angle, but I also realized that the essay form was just not roomy enough. I ended each reflection with the feeling that there was so much more to be said.

Hearing about this series naturally excited me. I started scheming as soon as I started my drive back to Boston. And when I got home, I looked up the publisher right away and wrote to ask if they were still accepting pitches. I had my reply a few hours later: what book did I want to propose?

Now, after all this eager haste, I had to pause and give the matter some serious thought. There are, like I said, a number of books that I feel have been decisive in my life—books that reshaped my outlook and sometimes even affected my course of action. At seventeen, as suggestible as a college freshman can be, I read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and spent months planning how I would expatriate myself to Europe. D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love all but defined my romantic outlook in high school. Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch fired my early writing ambitions . . . How would I decide?

Thinking in terms of a proposal, I turned the beam of my attention this way and that, trying to imagine what book I would be interested in writing about in that personal/literary way, and at some length. Memoirs of Hadrian, The Alexandria Quartet, To the Lighthouse . . . ? My list got longer the more I contemplated.

Unable to decide, I thought to work from the other direction. Instead of thinking about one book or another, I would concentrate on my inclinations and preoccupations, trying to isolate what basic themes I am now most compelled by in my own life. The book I chose would have to offer me the best pretext for delving there. When I put the question that way, the answer came almost immediately: Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.