Martin Amis' "Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other
Excursions" (1984 to 1993) brings up constant references to VN - which
most of you must be familiar with - but they might be
worth recovering:
"When Rushdie was close to finish
The Satanic Verses, Zafar made his father promise to forget about
grown-ups for a while and write a book for children[...] Haroun is a
minor classic of passionate invention[...]the reader is already sad, already
moved and haunted, by the book's dedication ( an acrostic) wh ich
refers to enforced distance, to a sense of thwarted homing, and to a lost ime
that no Happy Ending can redress:
Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu: All our
dream-worlds may come true. Fairly lands are fearsome too. As I
wander far from view, Read, and bring me home to
you." (Vanity Fair, 1999)
A very apposite start for an
exile's dedication, the lines that begin with "Zembla" to build "Zafar",
present both in Rushdies' book and at the end of Amis'
essay .
A comment continues to baffle me. Writing about Asimov
and his two-volume autobiography ( "In Memory Yet Green; In Joy Still
Felt"), Amis's set down: "Structurally, the
autobiography makes an average collection of showbiz memoirs look like Nabokov's
Speak, Memory. Furthermore, and on Asimov's own admission, nothing ever
happened to him."
What did Amis mean by his words
on autobiographies structurally and furthermore...?