Welcome to Litsy!

“Why did we feel so cheerful when it rained?“ --Vladimir Nabokov, quoting a letter from Tamara in “Speak, Memory“.

#12Booksof2021
#August

I‘m glad I read these, but actually neither was amazing. August was kind of a lame reading month for me, compared to the rest of the year.

“I confess I do not believe in time.“ --Vladimir Nabokov, “Speak, Memory“.

“Very lovely, very lonesome. But what am I doing in this stereoscopic dreamland? How did I get here?“ --Vladimir Nabokov, “Speak, Memory“.

I read this last summer and now I'm going through it more slowly, noting passages that are especially moving. Nabokov describes his childhood. His life is upended as his family loses almost everything in the Russian Revolution.

Self-indulgent? Evocative? Turgid? This was mainly, for me, impenetrable. I learned a lot about the natural magic of well-maintained wealthy Russia summer estates, of hunting butterflies, of the awkwardness of governesses and the eccentric personal tutors. But, looking for something I could pin down, a thought, a decision, an identity, I was grasping at fog. Within his heavy slow difficult atmospheric construction, he reveals nothing.

“Beyond the park, above streaming fields, a rainbow slipped into view; the fields ended in the notched dark border of a remote fir wood; part of the rainbow went across it, and that section of the forest edge shimmered most magically through the pale green and pink of the iridescent veil drawn before it: a tenderness and a glory that made poor relatives of the rhomboidal, colored reflections which the return of the sun had brought forth on …👇👇

Been trying to make some way through this. I don‘t know exactly how he managed to do it, but VN made this really difficult to read. I have to go slow, figure out implications of lots of stuff and remember it for the next paragraph or eventual end of the sentence. Brain worried about itself. Well, still early on.

This is a challenging book for me probably due to the writing style and my lack of knowledge of Russian history and this author. But I did enjoy the portion related to the author‘s father and the Russian history.

#MayBeNow
The three most important people I met in the past decade were my fiancee, niece, and nephew. I'm not a huge TV fan, but Netflix was pretty damn influential so I have four of my favorite shows listed (haven't seen Dead to Me Season 2 yet, but soon..). Axe throwing was the only trend I could come up with. And I think it was an unusually strong decade for horror films so I have my ten favorites of those listed.
@Cinfhen @BarbaraBB

Scores from this past week. I found the Nabokov at work and Red Sparrow at a yard sale.

Does anyone else have dreams set in the land of their childhood?

“...the odd fact that whenever possible the scenery of our infancy is used by an economically minded producer as a ready-made setting for our adult dreams....”

#butterfly

“The older the man, the queerer he looks with a butterfly net in his hand.”
Vladimir Nabokov, lifelong butterfly collector, not to mention esteemed writer, in his memoir, #SpeakMemory.

Still #TBR.

#Memory #ReadingResolutions

With The Burning Plain I have completed my 1950 TBR reading, so on to 1951. #Speak Memory is my first 1951 read, and I‘m about 100 pages in. Isn‘t the cover, a reproduction of a painting by one of my favorite artists, PAUL Klee, lovely

Still not sure how I feel about this memoir from Vladimir Nabokov. It started as a series of essays about his life from birth in 1899 to 1940; it still feels disjointed though it has been chronologically (re)arranged. The topics are wide-ranging, with the most engrossing bits in his privileged childhood in Tsarist Russia. The narrative lags at times, but - classic Nabokov - the language is absolutely beautiful.

THE cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Really interesting, lovely reminiscences. I'm excited to move forward and read more Nabokov.

Good bookstore day yesterday!

The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

Nabokov always says it like it is.

Talk about an opening sentence. Wow.