This masterful sentence serves as a reminder of Karl Popper’s warning that one cannot write “everything all at once.” At least not in a linear, natural-language text. The reader parses in sequence, a word or phrase at a time, solving complex semantic-scoping problems. Does “within a work of fiction” apply to the adjacent “young he” or to the “actual love letter” that occurs earlier in the sentence? The RE-reading, so often urged by VN, resolves the mild ambiguity in this case. The sentence is also a reminder, if such were needed, that Speak, Memory is a treasured insight into VN’s world and mind, uniquely defying the labels of memoir and autobiography.

Stan Kelly-Bootle.

On 03/03/2010 21:49, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:

"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."
 
Speak, Memory, Chapter Twelve, 5. The section begins with this sentence.
 
best,
Alexey
 
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