Nor is it a professional writer’s kitchen, with bits of unused material floating in a tepid brew of literary and personal stuff. It is not, for instance, one of those garrulous, formless, and rambling affairs, heavily relying on a diarist’s notes, that experts in other arts or the administrators of our public existence are apt to produce (“Wednesday night, around 11:40, General So-and-So telephoned. Nabokov’s book is easier to define in terms of what it is not than in terms of what it is. If its originality is not quite as attractive as the deep human glow that suffuses every page of Miss Braun’s “When Lilacs Last,” it contains, on the other hand, special sources of pleasure that no intelligent reader should miss.Ī unique freak as autobiographies go, Mr. Although to subtitle it “memoirs” seems an obvious step, there are certain features-not necessarily virtues-about “Conclusive Evidence” that set it completely apart from extant autobiographies, true, more or less true, or deliberately fictitious. Nabokov’s admirers will be not unreasonably elated by the publication of his new work. It is seldom that two such accomplishments reach a reviewer’s desk practically on the same day. The two books of memoirs before me, one by a Russian-born author, now a citizen of this country, the other by the granddaughter of a great American educationalist, are extremely elaborate affairs.
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