BOOKS: Vladimir Nabokov & Orhan Pamuk

First UK Edition

Memory and nostalgia are selective and play a great part in literature of all kinds.  I have recently read Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory - a master work of memoir that vividly evokes pre-Revolutionary Russia. 

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk is a slog by comparison but it too
transmits an acute sensibility.  Now there is a picture book, The Innocence of Objects -Pamuk's meticulously arranged museum of nostalgia - an extraordinary and riveting indulgence. Rooms everywhere have reference to the owner's past or present interests, their travels, their sensibility and, in some cases, their ability to arrange all this memorabilia in ways that please - we all have a museum of sorts.