Some memories—often the best and worst—burn inside us for lifetimes, florid, unforgettable, demanding to be set down.
Still, using devices more common to other memoirists, Nabokov can draw tears from me at certain passages as predictably as if turned on by a spigot. Students who fear sentimentality as death have to study Nabokov, who proves that sentimentality is only emotion you haven’t proven to the reader—emoti…
the kind of grotesque portraits Nabokov can paint of family underlings like his neurasthenic governess Mademoiselle
Nabokov’s sentences go on for lines and sometimes pages, and his highfalutin diction sprouts naturally from his polyglot education and rarefied background
This talent for truth includes a voice’s bold ability to render events we find unbelievable elsewhere. On the first page of Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost—for my money a book as worship-worthy as any of her prizewinning fiction—we hear about her encounters with the spirit world. On a staircase…
