Drugie berega

The autobiography of a pretentious bourgeois Russian writer with vivid attention to detail whose obsessed with memory, has a family tracing back centuries, a father whose a proud defender of the people, he witnessed the rise of Leninism firsthand and spent time studying at Oxford?

Sometimes books feel like they were written specifically for me.

Speak Memory is a tour of the slides of the author's memory projected onto the screen of the novel page. As Vladimir Nabokov is an utter master of the prosaic art, the image of his memory is wonderfully preserved in the medium of print. Nevertheless, despite the beauty of the slides preserved by Mnemosyne, the affair does at times feel like a family gathering in which your own grandfather unveils his antiquated slide projector and shares photographs of rather mundane moments in his childhood and youth. No one can deny Nabokov had a very interesting life, but whilst reading one cannot help at time but feel like one of the grandchildren looking on with respectful boredom.