Professor Vladimir Nabokov's beautiful memoir Speak Memory has now been succeeded by Strong Opinions—a collection of press clippings in which he has preserved for future classes what looks to be every interview granted during the last decade. (p. 61)
Alas, the Black Swan of Swiss-American letters has a lot of explaining to do (no singing, however: we need the swan for many a future summer). In addition to the bubbling interviews, Professor Nabokov recounts the many misunderstandings between him and the French publisher of Lolita, between him and the critics of his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, between him and various adversaries in the form of Letters to the Editor (by slyly omitting the pretext for each letter, he creates a loony Kafka-like mood). Included, too, are examples of his own book-chat…. Finally, he gives us several meticulous portraits of those butterflies he murdered ("with an expert nip of its thorax") during his celebrated tours of America's motels.
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