Fionnuala's Reviews > Speak, Memory

Nabokov is a joker.
If I hadn’t known that already, I’d have learned it when I reached the end of Speak, Memory.

I’d begun my review of the book when I was about half way through reading it, something I often do, preferring to jot down thoughts and impressions as I read in case I've forgotten the significance of this or that point by the time I've reached the end. Very soon I have a couple of readymade paragraphs and only need to tidy them up here and there, add a suitable opening and closing line, and voilà—the review has written itself.

So, imagine my surprise yesterday when I got to the end of Speak, Memory and glanced at the Appendix. What have we here, I wondered—for about half a minute. I soon figured out that the Appendix is a 'review' of Speak, Memory, supposedly written by someone other than Nabokov! And what's more, many of the points this ‘other’ person makes, in a slightly boring and pedestrian voice compared to the eloquence of the rest of the book, are points I’d already noted in my provisional review—plus in some of the other Nabokov reviews I’ve written in the last couple of weeks. Whoosh! All the wind has gone from my sails and an unsettled feeling of having been set up is creeping in.

And then today I read this line in The Gift which I've just begun: one hears the flippantly flat little voice of the reviewer (perhaps even of the female sex)... I look around to see if the ghost of Nabokov isn't sniggering at me from a Novemberdim corner of the room, saying, This one’s for Kinbote! (well, it is true that I was hard on Kinbote in my review of Pale Fire)

The result of all this is that I no longer feel like commenting on the carefully chosen themes in this memoir, nor do I feel like pointing out the nice balance between the personal and the general, the planned and the accidental, in the teasing out of those memories. And I do not want to talk about the many interesting references to poetry and parks, chess and fate, art and nature, which fill the pages of Speak, Memory. I had a section on the various heteronyms Nabokov uses throughout his work but that too is now obsolete, as are the thoughts about his brother Sergey, and the strong and unsettling resemblance between Sergey and the nameless narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

No, there’s no need for any of that now as it’s all been analysed in the Appendix, and in a far more erudite and pompous manner than I could ever manage. Nabokov has checkmated me nicely...

But I'll get my own back soon.

edit: 25th November: On page 196 of The Gift, a character accuses the narrator, Godunov (who resembles Nabokov more than a little), of being...a joker!
Let me tell you, my lad, you're quite a joker...