Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory (1967). New York: Vintage International, 1989.

Nabokov had a brother named Sergey who was 10.5 months younger than him and, critics have discovered, gay. He died in a concentration camp, where in this book Nabokov says he was put for criticizing the Hitler regime. Critics have suggested he was put there for his sexuality. I bring all this up because it obviously interested me on a personal level, but also because it made me rethink (or perhaps just think more deeply about) Pale Fire.

The charge has been leveled against Nabokov (dumbly, well after his death, with the grand effect being "Who cares?) that he was homophobic. As a gay man, I don't buy it. Granted, I've read only four books. But Speak, Memory makes clear the remorse N feels for his poor relationship with Sergey, and without ruining too much of the magic of the book, I saw this remorse in Pale Fire.

And I'm especially reminded of that moment in Lolita when Humbert tells us he was once diagnosed (by a psychotherapist, and even my cursory scan of Nabokov's writings makes it abundantly clear that the man dismissed Freudianism wholesale) as a homosexual. His reaction is to crack up, and in this laughter I see Nabokov laughing not at homosexuals, but at the culture of the 1950s that saw homosexuality as some illness to be treated, that could easily conflate homosexuality and pedophilia as two sides of the same coin.

All said, this book wasn't too engrossing. Incredibly written, but I found myself scanning over pages at times. Here's my favorite passage, favorite for the way N. starts with an ailment I share and yet pushes it to an almost mad-scientist amplitude. And the language!:

All my life I've been a poor go-to-sleeper. People in trains, who lay their newspaper aside, fold their silly arms, and immediately, with an offensive familiarity of demeanor, start snoring, amaze me as much as the uninhibited chap who cozily defecates in the presence of a chatty tubber, or participates in huge demonstrations, or joins some union in order to dissolve in it. Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing. The strain and drain of composition often force me, alas, to swallow a strong pill that gives me an hour or two of frightful nightmares or even to accept the comic relief of a midday snooze, the way a senile rake might totter to the nearest enthusiasm; but I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block; and if in the course of years, with the approach of a far more thorough and still more risible disintegration, which nowanights, I confess, detracts much from the routine terrors of sleep, I have grown so accustomed to my bedtime ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar ax is coming out of its great velvet-lined double-bass case, initially I had no such comfort or defense: I had nothing—except one token light in the potentially refulgent chandelier of Mademoiselle [his governess]'s bedroom, whose door, by our family doctor's decree (I salute you, Dr. Sokolov!), remained slightly ajar. Its vertical line of lambency (which a child's tears could transform into dazzling rays of compassion) was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim and my mind melt in a travesty of the death struggle. (108-9)