I often read several books at once, a page or two here and there, so it can take me a long time to finish them. I’ve been working through Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory for so long now that the time when I started the book is, fittingly, already distant.

Speak, Memory describes Nabokov’s life from 1903 to 1940. He published a revised version in 1966. So when Nabokov wrote this autobiography in the 1940s, it was already a recollection of his past; as he rewrote, it became a revisiting of recollections.

Speak, Memory feels like a book from another age. It’s not just about Nabokov’s own memories but also about memory itself and the passage of time. It is luxuriously, unapologetically rich, full, lush, searching after remembered details — the characteristics of a mushroom, the idiosyncrasies of a tutor — as if each were fully alive and important in its own right.

We’re so often told that the past and future can’t be changed; we have to live in the present, to be in the moment. The primacy of the now is such a widespread idea that it has come to seem like truth. How refreshing, then, to encounter a different perspective, one that acknowledges and revels in the power of the past.

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory.  That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

(NY: Pyramid, 1966, p. 57)