A thoughtful consideration of an iconic memoir.
Essayist, editor, and memoirist Birkerts, preoccupied by thoughts of “time, memory, patterns,” was drawn to Speak, Memory, the Russian author’s finely crafted rendering of his past. In a sensitive, sympathetic examination of the memoir, Birkerts focuses both on Nabokov’s revelations about his life and, in close detail, on his craft: how “he worked his strategies from page to page.” As a memoirist himself, Birkerts looks to Nabokov as exemplar: How does one write a memoir? What unconscious forces shape it? He admires Nabokov’s ability to convey details about his childhood while maintaining authorial distance: “the naive before presented through the filter of the sophisticated after.” Birkerts had been unpleasantly surprised by the response of many people he portrayed in his own memoir; some felt miscast and others slighted because they played only a small part. Nabokov, he notes, “chose to honor the essential privacy of his immediate family” while at the same time making his narrative seem intimate, choosing even to include family photos. Besides seeing Nabokov as his “guide and inspiration,” Birkerts feels an affinity for his experience of exile, nostalgia, and cultural dislocation. The son of Latvian immigrants, Birkerts, too, grew up feeling “an inner split,” which generated in him an abiding penchant “for contemplating the past.” He charts his responses to rereading the book at several different times in his life as well as his growing admiration for “the lyricism, the unwinding brilliance of the sentences.” He closely examines the “sardonic, playful, melancholic, fanatically precise” quality of the author’s voice on the page. Along with discoursing on themes of “eternity and infinity,” Birkerts closes by reflecting on “the sweeping cultural transition” from analog to digital that he has long decried, reflections that set his response to Nabokov in context.
A thoughtful consideration of an iconic memoir.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1632-46107-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
A slim, somber classic.
Didion (We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction, 2006, etc.) delivers a second masterpiece on grief, considering both her daughter’s death and her inevitable own.
In her 2005 book, The Year of Magical Thinking, the much-decorated journalist laid bare her emotions following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The same year that book was published, she also lost her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, after a long hospitalization. Like Magical Thinking, this book is constructed out of close studies of particular memories and bits of medical lingo. Didion tests Quintana’s childhood poems and scribblings for hints of her own failings as a mother, and she voices her helplessness at the hands of doctors. “I put the word ‘diagnosis’ in quotes because I have not yet seen that case in which a ‘diagnosis’ led to a ‘cure,’ ” she writes. The author also ponders her own mortality, and she does so with heartbreaking specificity. A metal folding chair, as she describes it, is practically weaponized, ready to do her harm should she fall out of it; a fainting spell leaves her bleeding and helpless on the floor of her bedroom. Didion’s clipped, recursive sentences initially make the book feel arid and emotionally distant. But she’s profoundly aware of tone and style—a digression about novel-writing reveals her deep concern for the music sentences make—and the chapters become increasingly freighted with sorrow without displaying sentimentality. The book feels like an epitaph for both her daughter and herself, as she considers how much aging has demolished her preconceptions about growing old.
A slim, somber classic.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26767-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
Ethereal spins of innocence and enchantment.
A slim, poetic memoir of Smith’s early years.
Originally published in 1992, this manuscript was handwritten on graph paper when Smith lived with her husband and children near Detroit during a time in which she experienced “a terrible and inexpressible melancholy.” Throughout, the author intersperses vignettes from childhood with black-and-white photos. The title stems from an exchange with an old man whom children feared; she forgot her question but remembers his answer: “They be the woolgatherers.” Smith writes, “I was not at all sure what a woolgatherer was but it sounded a worthy calling and seemed a good job for me. And so I kept watch [and]…wandered among them, through thistle and thorn, with no task more exceptional than to rescue a fleeting thought, as a tuft of wool, from the comb of the wind.” Ardent Smith fans may be enamored with her recollections, which range from mourning the family dog’s death to nebulous lines such as, “I drifted to a place that seemed more present than myself, sitting, dutifully sewing as my fingers let slip the thread and joined my mind, elsewhere." In verse, she writes, “Careful how you bare yer soul / Careful not to bare it all.” In a more concrete passage, she declares, “The only thing you can count on is change.” The writing elucidates, to some degree, Smith’s artistic path, with themes of ritualizing time and space rippling throughout. After saying prayers, Smith recounts, “on particularly wondrous nights…something would unzip and I’d be off to be among them [the woolgatherers]. I did not run, I’d glide—some feet above the grass. This was my secret ability—my crown.” This edition includes a new afterword, penned by Smith in 2020, that addresses the pandemic as it relates to restricted travel; she combats restlessness by journeying through memories.
Ethereal spins of innocence and enchantment.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8112-3125-1
Page Count: 112
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
