No Place to Lay One's Head

The Gift, Nabokov’s last Russian novel and a farewell to

Nabokov’s Berlin stories and novels, which he wrote in Russian and which are the most moving of his works

encounters. You retain a suspended memory of them, the memory of somebody who didn’t have time to tell you everything

the effect of hearing the voice of somebody whose face one can’t quite make out in the half-light and who is recounting an episode from their life

I prefer not to know what Françoise Frenkel’s face looked like, nor the twists and turns of her life after the war, nor the date of her death.

We miss our childhood years when we would read The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, written under the pseudonym B. Traven, a man whose identity remained unknown even to his publishers