In a way, the clarity of Nabokov's Speak, Memory disturbs me. My own recollections of childhood are, comparatively, so fractured and self-serving. They feel both unreliable and episodic, as if my life has been a jumpy homemade filmstrip rather than a smoothly unrolling panorama. I suppose the way in which one remembers must influence a memoirist's writing style, but my own memory rhythms also remind me why I'm primarily a poet rather than a memoirist. Jumpy episodic dramas are far easier to manage in poetic form: they lend themselves to image and sound experiment, to unexpected juxtapositions and ambiguity; whereas the smooth unrolling of history, a la Wordsworth's Prelude, seems to create long stretches of tedium in poetry. Later in Speak, Memory Nabokov talks about how he learned that he was not a poet, and when I get to that point again, I'll tell you what he says. I do remember that, when I first read it, his explanation made perfect sense to me and I'm hoping that it will again this time.

Nonetheless, despite the writer's self-declared non-poetic status, his memoir includes passages of great sensory beauty, both in sound and in image--for instance, this one:

We children had gone down to the village, and it is when I recall that particular day that I see with the utmost clarity the sun-spangled river; the bridge, the dazzling tin of a can left by a fisherman on its wooden railing; the linden-treed hill with its rosy-red church and marble mausoleum where my mother's dead reposed; the dusty road to the village; the strip of short, pastel-green grass, with bald patches of sandy soil, between the road and the lilac bushes behind which walleyed, mossy log cabins stood in a rickety row; the stone building of the new schoolhouse near the old wooden one; and, as we swiftly drove by, the little black dog with very white teeth that dashed out from among the cottages at a terrific pace but in absolute silence, saving his voice for the brief outburst he would enjoy when his muted spurt would at last bring him close to the speeding carriage.