Another book review!

 

An excerpt of Brian Dillon (Irish Times):        

"she treats us to sentences like this one, regarding the famous dappled and vertiginous first page of the autobiography, Speak, Memory : “Time’s pale fire now wheeled the weight of the world, shedding light on the discreteness of things, cracking open the dormer window of consciousness.” ... The problem here is not so much the coy reference to Nabokov’s own Pale Fire ..., as the fact that Zanganeh has wholly mistaken how the novelist’s style works in the first place. Nabokov’s prose was many things – languid and vicious by turns, arch and sometimes pompous, bejewelled with dictionary treasures – but one thing it was not was “poetic” in this slackly abstract sense. (Zanganeh’s efforts in this line read more like the figurative mush of Michael Ondaatje than they do like Nabokov.) ...she seems frequently to forget her own point in favour of these airy and at worst bathetic excursions into eloquence...”