Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive.

If Nabokov is anything, he's clever. Unfortunately for Nabokov, clever is as clever does is rarely good enough in my case, so that lack of fifth star is a team effort on both our parts. Fortunately for Nabakov, so are the remaining four stars, making this review a pleased one despite all my grumbling.

As stated in the summary, the book encompasses fairy tale, epic, thoughts on time, parody of novel, and erotica. The first and second were of medium intrigue and the fifth rapidly grew old due to the reader's personal preferences, leaving said reader to relish the pieces and parcels of the third and fourth that were registered to a pleasing extent.

In full, deliberate consciousness, at the moment of the hooded click, he bunched the recent past with the imminent future and thought to himself that this would remain an objective perception of the real present and that he must remember the flavor, the flash, the flesh of the present (as he, indeed, remembered it a half dozen years later - and now, in the second half of the next century).

But here we run into more misfortune, for if you're going to parody names such as Mann and Proust, you have to measure up to the point of the reader preferring the imitation to the original. For this reader, it was close, but no cigar. As for the meditations on time, they dabbled and dipped and came up with some rather intricate insight, but for one whose reading history includes Borges, the meanderings ultimately paled in comparison.

Alright, enough with the lackluster comparisons. For amidst this multifarious reception of puzzle pieces we have the ever present Nabokov, crowd-pleaser in the turn of phrase sense extraordinare. Other reviews have gone on about the linguistic tricks, so I will leave that to far more capable and interested hands than mine. For while I do like my well-crafted sentences, indeed to the point of having maintained a collection for several years, I am not enamored with deconstructing the whys and wherefores (redundant but rhythmic which concerns us now does it not?). I caught the alliteration, but the rest of the classifications went over my head. Those who are keener on that sort of thing than I, however, are in for a treat.

In the end, I wasn't bowled over enough to ignore the predecessors of yore. But I can assure you, the sum is far more than the incest of its parts.

"If I could write," mused Demon, "I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously—c'est le mot—art and science meet in an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal bosquet."