Speak, Memory--Ch. 12

"Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives." --Vladimir Nabokov, page 249

This chapter is where things get really serious in Nabokov's life, when he really departs from childhood. We get tinges of seriousness and the war throughout the whole book, but this chapter directly deals with the war going on. His story about Tamara amidst all of this just makes his story more real, the story of a real young person living in a time like this. I loved his descriptions of the females he fell for or were intrigued by; Nabokov has a gift at painting portraits of people with his words. I like this sentence a lot because it speaks to a part of all our memories, the place that stores away all of our romances and wants to preserve all those moments.