Jan 2, 2010

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited | Critical Overview

Critics and literary historians have generally praised Speak, Memory as an excellent twentieth-century autobiography, memoir, and work of creative non- fiction. In a 1967 New York Times review, Eliot Fremont-Smith compared Nabokov’s achievement to the fiction writing of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, recovering ‘‘forgotten feelings and past events from dark corners of the prison of time’’ in ways that allow the ‘‘evidence’’ to be ‘‘reordered, reenergized and expressed, at once transformed and re-created into memory and art.’’ Julian Moynahan...