Rating: 
Summary: Stunning, beautiful, poetic, but not for the general reader!
Review: Nabakov is indisputably one on of the greatest prose-stylists of the 20th century. Nabokov utilizes his full range of writing tricks, styles, and poetics to describe his life in "Speak, memory." Nabakov describes his youth in a spiral like fashion. Ironically, yet vividly, he emphasizes a lot on the little and seemingly insignificant things that we remember, despite being well traveled and cultured. Such as the first pen, crazy stewards, and annoying college room mates. However, this ain't a book to read in the bathtub, folks! Equip yourself with a dictionary. Otherwise, you may drown! It will take you a while, maybe the first fifty pages to get the hang of his writing. It has a foreign tune to it with very complex words. If you are patient then you will savor his dreamy-like way with words. However, a reader may be offended by Nabakov's personality reflected by "Speak, memory ". He is arrogant, pampered, and unstable. He never ever talked of the peasants before or during the Russian Revolution. He even hardly scratches the surface of his long stay and experience in America. It's hard to tell if he eschews events and feelings that are too foreign or offensive to him. Obviously, it may be hard to hold his hand when one examines his stubborn attitude and the way he thinks. ( Look at the reviews above ) But for literary aesthetes, one can hold his hand when cherishing his elegant, dreamy, rich, complex, insights and use of language.
Rating: 
Summary: Good in its limited way
Review: Nabokov's memoirs of his early life up until the time he left Europe for America in 1940. The majority of the book is devoted to Nabokov's childhood, and the detail with which he recalls events is extraordinary - so much so that I suspected that he was embellishing his actual recollection in order to make the book a better read. Nabokov discounts this in the appendix to the edition I was reading, although having read a lot of Nabokov's work I've learned to distrust such disclaimers. Rather than a straightforward linear narrative, Nabokov gives his impressions of his immediate family, in particular his mother and father's habits and quirks, as well as recalling small but significant episodes from his life. You do get a brief family history as well as (inevitably) an account of how the family was affected by the Bolshevik Revolution, but these do not form the main themes of the work (for example, there's more on Nabokov's impressions of Cambridge than criticism of the Soviet Union). I should imagine this is a must for all Nabokov fans, but for those wanting a more complete picture of his life, I should imagine a biography would be a better bet.
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Summary: N's powerful defense of liberty and preservation of home.
Review: Nabokov's Speak, Memory is enjoyable and useful precisely because his experience of exile is so unique and so uniquely written. Time limits the autobiographer to dates, actual experiences and other rather black and white exegesis of life, but memory combined with the imagination fuses fiction to fact in way that compells the imaginative reader to explore his spatial-reality: what is a "colored spiral in a ball of glass" (275). This is both the way Nabokov apprehends (with emphasis on seeing) his life, and his philosophical-artistic vision towards literature-the dramatization of one's vision. Nabokov limits himself to no such temporal and autobiographical constructs, and as such recreates and creatively illuminates his attitude towards a forgotten world, namely pre-Lenin Russia. Time, similar to Lenin, dictates his inability to return to his past utopian existance, the fantasy world of adolescent lust that the Russian Revolution crushed. Yes, we can read Speak, Memory as a subversion of totalitarianism, but it replaces the void usually created by such negitive-charged, albeit justified, criticism with the regenerating powers of the imagination. With the intensity of spiritual euphoria, Nabokov embraces his liberating memory: "I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended wandering tonalities of the past" (170). Nabokov's prose is at times opaque and tedious to the fact seeking critic, but good literature as well as poetry challenges the reader to imagine more than words and dates. While reading Speak, Memory one realizes that it is at once the telling of Nabokov's life story, his reverence for and commemoration of memory told with the subtle candor of an egocentric adolescent whose profound discourse eclipses our dull, time-regulated reality with his luminous, spatially expansive immagination. This book is worth the time it takes to read it, because Nabokov reminds the reader what it is like to lose one's home. He does not, however, lament his loss to the point of self-pity. On the other hand, Nabokov claims the significance of the individual's experience over the group's, the particular over the general. In the last years of a century which began and ends with war, Nabokov, a literary exile of the 20th century, finds hope in the irrational landscapes of the mind, the home of the spirit, the imagination.
Rating: 
Summary: great memory, bad book
Review: Obviously, I am the only philistine here, but I disliked the book, and gave up after the first 100 pages or so. The reviews here call the book tedious, irritating, haphazard, etc., yet they obviously found something to savor in it. Alas, I am not one of them. Perhaps it was the writing style that did me in, as I am not familiar with the author's other books. But I do think most memoirs benefit from having at least a rudimentary linear format. This book was like what the mind may do before you fall fully asleep - it plays hopscotch and images, people, places, etc. all tumble about willy nilly. I don't think imposing a more straightforward format on your memories necessarily destroys the beauty of them. It's just common courtesy if they're going to be out there for the public to cnosume.
Rating: 
Summary: A lyrical, mesmerizing experience
Review: Speak, Memory is one of about five books I could read over and over again. Nabakov's lyrical style is dream-like. His humility is amazing. Most people who had all that he had would be whining and crying, but all that matters to Nabakov is life, not the things of life. One critic said that the death of Nabakov's father luminates over the work, but I see butterfly wings and joy and happiness. Yes, losing his father was a terrible experience, but as Nabakov said, we are caterpillars to the angels. Everyone who considers themselves the least bit literate should read this book, and do so more than once. With Brian Boyd's superb introduction and the richly rewarding chapter 16, this edition is THE edition to buy and read--but don't loan it out, because it may not be returned.
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Summary: Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
Review: Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited written by Vladimir Nabokov is a rather enchanting, but poetic book about the author's early life. A recollection of his youthful years remembering is father as more liberal-minded and his mother as he describes her as very beautiful. The author takes on a trip though time, a time soon to be shattered by the Soviet dictatorship. The author writes in a style that commands the English language, but with a foreign taste, making for an interesting read. The author's choice and usage of words will challange you so, be prepared to with a good dictionary and the meaning may be the secord or third usage. The life style in St. Petersburg and the surrounding countryside are recalled by the author in a writing style wholly his own as he uses all the powers of an excellent writer to convey this intensely human, yet cultured story. The book has splendid country estates, nostalgia, lost childhood and paint a rather unique picture of a loving family suddenly torn from peace to terror of the Bolshevik Revolution. We are taken on a tour de force through England for education, An emigre life in Paris and Berlin. But most of all the book is a work of nostalgia and lost childhood written with a unique style by a master stylist of the English language.
Rating:
Summary: A poetic autobiography
Review: The flavor , the style the special kind of intense perceptiveness of visual reality makes this autobiography a kind of impressionistic tone- poem. Nabakov writes of his childhood in the aristocratic home and family he is to be exiled from. He writes with longing of the world that has past, and with an intense kind of vitality of his own passions for literature, lepidoptery , love. This is next to Pnin, and Ada my favorite work of Nabakov.
It does not press forward on a bedrock of fact but swirls through the mind with color and a beautiful intricacy of language. Quintessential Nabokov .
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Summary: Best Autobiography
Review: This book is a delight. Some of the criticisms listed here remark that the biography, though beautiful, is not informative enough, humorless, or even fundamentally dislikable. I disagree. I believe that Nabakov possessed enough skill and intent to write an autobiography in any tone or context he might choose; I therefore believe that the lens through which he shows us his youth has been carefully chosen and rendered. Dry accounts of facts and events in so many biographies make them a struggle to enjoy - not so here. Nabakov masterfully gives the story a quality of aged distance, sharing with us moments from his youth that have not only remained important to him as an adult, but presents these moments as breathtaking vignettes that when carefully studied reveal poignant beauty and touching nostalgia. Surely only Nabakov himself could decide the best way to present his memory, and what a stunning, well-articulated gift he has given us in doing so.
Rating:
Summary: great
Review: This book is a fantastic recollection of the moments and incidents in Nabokov's life which so profoundly afffected him. Written in the usual Nabokovian style, so if you're expecting a dull, chronological recitation of the major events, you won't find it here. An enjoyable read, though I would probably rec it to fans of the man's work.
Rating:
Summary: Amusing musings
Review: This is a book best appreciated by those who have already spent much time in the company of the refined riddles that are Nabokov's novels. Nabokov's writing style is full of linguistic flourishes which leave one with no doubt that language in his hands becomes a fine instrument indeed, he takes the normal art of storytelling and novel making merely as a suggestion from which he departs wherever and whenever he sees fit to serve the higher calling, his own sublime whims. Speak, Memory is no exception as the general rule of anarchy at play in Nabokovian fiction applies to it as well. So if you like the game playing that goes on in his work this is in that same category of entertainment. There are however more conventional biographies available if that is what you seek(Boyd wrote an excellent several tome study of his work and life). Nabokov is an artist who has turned his own rarefied sensibility into his own favorite topic in this favorite topics driven "autobiography", it is really a several ring circus and all rings feature Nabokov achieving mastery over yet another of them and in all the rings the central figure is all the while winking.
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